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Inside the billionaire's trick to keep people from voting

Thom Hartmann

September 23, 2024

Outside of Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan (and a hedge fund guy), just about all American billionaires are white. And while their white privilege helped most of them to become billionaires in the first place, for the politically active billionaires on the right, it’s their money that they care about the most.

Fred Koch, the founding patriarch of the Koch family, was an early supporter of the John Birch Society (JBS), which vigorously opposed any efforts to reduce the powers of the very wealthy white people or elevate the wealth or political power of poor or working-class people. Their most public positions in the 1950s and 1960s were against racial integration and communism— the ultimate method for leveling the fortunes of the rich. The JBS opposed virtually all “welfare” legislation, from Social Security to Medicare to unemployment insurance, calling it socialism and equating it with a softer version of communism. Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.

In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it strong over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:

In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35

It means nothing, in other words, if average people are ground into the dirt. But when people who inherited wealth face challenges, particularly those from average working families, they should be able to utterly destroy them.

ALSO READ: Trump has a brand new front in the Haitian conspiracy push

In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge, and greed.”

While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.

Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.

That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.

The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.

The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.

As Mark Ames wrote:

The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism and neoliberalism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.36

Friedman was later implicated in the aftermath of the brutal and violent takedown of democracy in Chile, and his acolytes helped privatize the state-owned properties of the Soviet Union, creating the kleptocratic and oligarchic government that now runs Russia and many of the former Soviet states. Libertarianism, it turns out, has had real-world impacts, which include the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

No country has ever successfully established a libertarian form of economy or governance; it was, after all, a scam set up to front for the very rich, and the corporations that made them that way. But that hasn’t stopped libertarian and corporatist ideologues from trying.

While Chile and Russia are well-known examples, few Americans seem to remember how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld simply stood on the sidelines watching as the treasures of Iraq were looted after the United States took down their government.

It was to be a Grand Experiment: they’d finally prove that without government interference in a nation’s economy or social systems, an utopia would emerge. L. Paul Bremer was their front man, arriving in Iraq on May 2, 2003, to begin the process of “freeing” the country’s economy so that the world’s corporations would flood in and create a paradise.

As Naomi Klein wrote for Harper’s Magazine in an article titled “Baghdad Year Zero”:

The tone of Bremer’s tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country’s borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared two weeks after he arrived, was “open for business.”

One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq’s non-oil-related economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would be privatized immediately. “Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands,” he said, “is essential for Iraq’s economic recovery.” It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.37

Once again, Milton Friedman, the FEE’s heirs, and libertarianism made a few more billionaires and destroyed the lives of literally millions of people.

The source of the funds being channeled to Friedman back in 1949 was a man named Herbert Nelson, who was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which not only was opposed to rent control laws but also had one of the largest lobbying budgets in Washington, DC.

Congressional investigators found a letter he wrote in 1949 saying:

“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote.

“I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”38

Although the details are still a bit fuzzy, it appears that libertarianism (and the creation of a political party using that name) was Nelson’s idea, or at least one he promoted vigorously. With a budget of over $60 million (in today’s dollars), Nelson hired the FEE to come up with a third party that would argue for the interests of the wealthy developers and landlords he represented. The FEE, in turn, hired Milton Friedman.

Reason Magazine, heavily funded by the Kochs, was the main voice of the libertarian movement in the 1970s, and in 1977 it published a fascinating article by Moshe Kroy that described how libertarians should market their free-market fundamentalism to skeptical Americans.

Noting that it was important not to lie to people outright, Kroy wrote:

“The point is that you can use tricks—and you’d better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.”39

The tricks involved repackaging and reframing libertarian dogma and using “salesmanship.”

For example, Kroy asserted that the average person wouldn’t understand an abstraction like individual rights. So don’t even bother explaining how libertarianism would shrink government and empower corporations and the rich. “Instead,” Kroy wrote”

“[W]hat you can do is to explain to him that libertarianism is just against one thing: CRIME. By crime you mean just what he means: theft, robbery, kidnapping, enslavement. He will of course agree, because he thinks this is obvious. Then you just explain (at great length, and with many examples) that taxation is armed robbery, that inflation through deficit spending and money printing is theft—as well as forgery of money—that draft is basically kidnapping, etc.”40

This was something the average person could understand. The government that people thought would protect them from polluting corporations, would provide an efficient court and fiscal system to protect their jobs and bank accounts from corporate grifters, and would defend their lives in war if necessary—that government was, in fact, an evil thing.

If the billionaires could get the average American to look at government the way that oil, chemical, real estate, and banking industry billionaires did, and just elect politicians who were bought and paid for by those industries, then things would get very, very easy.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll/

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/03/excerpt-from-naomi-oreskes-the-big-myth/

excerpt:

this is the story of how American business manufactured a myth that has, for decades and to our detriment, held us in its grip. It is the true history of a false idea: the idea of “the magic of the marketplace.”

Some people call it market absolutism or market essentialism. In the 1990s, George Soros popularized the name we find most apt: market fundamentalism. It’s a quasi-religious belief that the best way to address our needs — whether economic or otherwise — is to let markets do their thing, and not rely on government. Market fundamentalists treat “The Market” as a proper noun: something unique and unto itself, that has agency and even wisdom, that functions best when left unfettered and unregulated, undisturbed and unperturbed. Government, according to the myth, cannot improve the functioning of markets; it can only interfere. Governments therefore need to stay out of the way, lest they “distort” the market and prevent it from doing its “magic.” In the late 20th century, market fundamentalism was cloaked in the seemingly ancient raiments of received wisdom. In fact, it was more or less invented in the 20th century.

Classical liberal economists — including Adam Smith — recognized that government served essential functions, including building infrastructure for everyone’s benefit and regulating banks, which, left to their own devices, could destroy an economy. They also recognized that taxation was required to enable governments to perform those functions. But in the early 20th century, a group of self-styled “neo-liberals” shifted economic and political thinking radically. They argued that any government action in the marketplace, even well intentioned, compromised the freedom of individuals to do as they pleased — and therefore put us on the road to totalitarianism. Political and economic freedom were “indivisible,” they insisted: any compromise to the latter was a threat to the former — any compromise at all, even to address obvious ills like child labor or workplace injury. Why did we ever come to accept a worldview so impervious to facts? A worldview Smith himself, often thought of as the father of free-market capitalism, would have rejected? How did so many Americans come to have so much faith in markets and so little faith in government?

Market fundamentalism is not just the belief that free markets are the best means to run an economic system but also the belief that they are the only means that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. It is the belief in the primacy of economic freedom not just to generate wealth but as a bulwark of political freedom. And it is the belief that markets exist outside of politics and culture, so that it can be logical to speak of leaving them “alone.”

We are all familiar with the idea that, as Soros has summarized, “the doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest.” That’s the core argument Adam Smith made in 1776 and contented capitalists have accepted ever since. Market fundamentalists, however, depart from Smith by insisting there is no “common good,” merely the sum of all the individual private goods. For this reason, they reject government’s claims to represent “the people”: there are only people — individuals — who represent themselves, and they do this most effectively not through their governments, even democratically elected ones, but through free choices in free markets.

Milton Friedman, America’s most famous market fundamentalist, went so far as to argue that voting was not democratic, because it could too easily be distorted by special interests and because in any case most voters were ignorant. But rather than consider how special interests might be mitigated or how voters could be better informed, he maintained that true freedom was not expressed in the voting booth. “The economic market provides a greater degree of freedom than the political market,” Friedman said in South Africa in 1976, as he encouraged the citizens of that country not to fuss over apartheid, but to preserve and expand their market-based economy.

Friedman’s argument works when we are talking about the freedom to buy, say, shoes of any type. But it fails when we consider the larger picture, including deceptive advertising, aggressive and misleading PR campaigns, and what economists call “external costs”: costs that are invisible to or misunderstood by the shoe buyers, or that accrue to people who didn’t buy those shoes at all. Pollution is an external cost. What happens when the shoe manufacturer dumps toxic chemicals behind the plant and hides that fact from its workers, investors, and customers? Friedman downplayed the problem by giving it the friendly label of “neighborhood effects,” and claimed that any remedy would almost always be worse than the disease, because of the loss of freedoms or compromises to property rights typically associated with government regulations. In some cases, he may have been right. Regulations do compromise someone’s freedom in order to protect the freedom (and welfare) of others. When it comes to pollution, the “freedom” of factories to dump toxic wastes has been rightly rejected. When it comes to climate change, the “freedom” of corporations to sell oil, gas, and coal jeopardizes the rest of us. This creates a fundamental dilemma for the fundamentalists. But rather than rethink their arguments, market fundamentalists protect their worldview by denying that climate change is real or asserting that somehow “The Market” will fix it, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Friedman held that capitalism and freedom are two indivisible sides of the same coin, but this “indivisibility thesis” predates him by decades. In the early 20th century, it was promoted in the United States by a group of industrialists working under the umbrella of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). NAM and its allies used the thesis to argue against political reforms that today we take for granted, such as laws limiting child labor, establishing workers’ compensation, and creating the federal income tax. In the 1930s, they aligned themselves with the electricity industry and used the thesis to argue against the Rural Electrification Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other elements of the New Deal. Mostly they lost these fights, in part because the thesis suffered a fatal flaw: it wasn’t true. Electricity was a case in point. Markets had failed to bring electricity to millions of Americans who wanted it, but the government had succeeded, and rural Americans were better off economically and no less free. Indeed, they were arguably freer than before, because they now had electrical appliances that reduced manual labor and electric lights to lengthen the usable day.

Because the indivisibility thesis had so little foundation in fact, American business leaders needed to find other ways to shore it up. One way was propaganda. In the 1920s, the National Electric Light Association (NELA) launched a massive campaign that included, among other things, the hiring of academics to rewrite textbooks and develop curricula to promote pro- market, antigovernment perspectives in emerging business schools and economics programs across the country. They also recruited experts to “prove” that private electricity was cheaper than public electricity, even when the available facts showed otherwise. In the 1930s, NAM reprised the effort, with a multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign to convince Americans that business and industry were working just fine, and that the real causes of the Great Depression were unionized labor’s unreasonable demands, coupled with the government’s excessive interference in business affairs and federal taxation that starved industry of the monies it needed to expand productive capacity. Well into the 1940s, NAM produced books, pamphlets, radio programs, lecture series, and documentary and feature films (and later television programs) designed to influence what newspapers had to say about the economy and American life, what teachers taught in the classroom, and, above all, what the American people believed.

Another strategy was to recruit sympathetic intellectuals to help give the myth credibility. For this, American businessmen relied on imports: the economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, leaders of the Austrian school of economics. In the 1940s, a group linked to NAM paid for Mises and Hayek to come to America, arranged for them to be hired at New York University and the University of Chicago, respectively, and worked assiduously to promote the economists’ ideas, both in business circles and among the American people generally. This included publishing a dumbed-down version of Hayek’s famous book “The Road to Serfdom” in Reader’s Digest and a cartoon version of it in Look magazine. In the 1950s, Ronald Reagan would encounter that Reader’s Digest version; decades later “The Road to Serfdom” would be promoted by right-wing radio hosts Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and touted by influential Republicans including Senator Ted Cruz and House leader Paul Ryan.

Businessmen helped create America’s first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), established in 1946 by Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce manager Leonard Read to peddle pro-market, antigovernment ideology. They also funded the Hayek-aligned Mont Pelerin Society, a cadre of mostly European economists, cultural commentators, and political theorists promoting a renewed commitment to free-market principles under the aegis of what became known as neoliberalism. And they would help Milton Friedman write his most influential book, “Capitalism and Freedom” — essentially a restatement of the indivisibility thesis — which would dramatically reshape the American cultural conversation in the 1970s and ’80s. In 1988, Reagan would award Friedman both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science.

Few of Friedman’s readers knew that the book’s success was not the product of open competition in the marketplace of ideas: “Capitalism and Freedom” had been financed and nurtured by American businessmen, and it was the most public part of a much larger project. Reader’s Digest notwithstanding, the people who had brought Hayek to America had quickly concluded that his approach was too intellectual and too European to break through to the public.

Most Americans know that before becoming a politician Reagan was an actor, but fewer are aware that Reagan’s flagging screen career was revived by a job with the General Electric Corporation (GE). Reagan hosted the popular television show “General Electric Theater,” where each week his voice and face reached into tens of millions of homes, promoting didactic stories of individualism and free enterprise. At the same time, he traveled across the country on behalf of GE — visiting factories, making speeches at schools, and doing the dinner circuit in communities where GE had a presence — promoting the corporation’s stridently individualist antiunion and antigovernment vision.

Reagan’s mentor in this work was GE executive Lemuel Ricketts Boulware, whose antiunion tactics were so extreme they earned a name: Boulwarism. (They would also earn GE several indictments for federal labor law violations.) And while Reagan helped GE promote the ideology of free markets and free choice, the company conspired to rig electricity markets (an offense for which it would be successfully prosecuted in the 1960s). Boulware’s influence transformed Reagan’s politics. He went into GE a New Deal Democrat and came out an antigovernment conservative Republican. GE transformed Reagan’s political fortunes as well; he emerged from his time there with powerful backers in corporate America who helped him launch his career in elected office.

Reagan was known as the Great Communicator, and the success of American market fundamentalism was ultimately a triumph of public relations: its advocates built a myth and persuaded Americans of its truth. By the 1970s, what had begun as a self-interested defense of business prerogatives — one that was factually dubious and characteristically supported by gross distortions and misrepresentations of history — had been transmogrified into a seemingly intellectually robust body of thought.

Meanwhile, a network of libertarian think tanks, heavily funded by industries selling dangerous products including tobacco and fossil fuels, had been established to promote these views in schools, in universities, and in American life writ large. Among other things, these think tanks distributed free of charge millions of copies of Hayek’s and Friedman’s (and Ayn Rand’s) books. Meanwhile, progressive foundations mostly focused on specific issues — like saving whales or expanding access to education — not realizing that a larger ideological battle was under way. The myth spread, influencing American presidents from Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and, most recently, Donald Trump.

Americans in the early 20th century were largely suspicious of “Big Business” and saw the government as their ally. By the later decades of the century, this had flipped: many Americans now admired business leaders as “entrepreneurs” and “job creators” and believed it made more sense to count on the “magic of the marketplace” to solve problems than to engage government. Many Americans saw government as dead weight, taxation as unfair or even a form of theft. That they accepted these claims is proof of this story’s importance: propaganda and persuasion had worked. The people involved in this project were intellectually diverse and geographically dispersed, but they were also in important (and sometimes startling) ways interconnected. Theirs was not a conspiracy, but it was a network of people who knew each other, supported each other morally and financially, and used this mutual support to promote a singular myth.

WHO 3%

Discussion

What motivates experts and non-experts alike to pursue a position on climate change contrary to scientific consensus? The role of conservative politics, conservative think tanks, and industry efforts that make up the CCCM is well documented; however, our findings reveal other similarities among contrarians worthy of consideration.

In particular, the data reveal that most individuals in our data are aged sixty-five or older. This age group, at least in the United States, is also the most likely age group to disagree with the climate consensus; conversely,80 per cent of expert Earth scientists who agree with the consensus on AGW are under the age of sixty-five (Pew Research Center 2015). Although many individuals in our sample were non-experts, the experts were also aged 65 or older on average, with an average birth year of 1944. [1964 GOLDWATER, DIVISIONS ON VIET NAM ETC IE ORIG CTR-CULTURE] While we expect contrarian experts to hold views different from most of the scientific community, this age distinction suggests there may be other reasons that led these individuals to align with contrarian efforts. Individuals' experiences, for example, may impact their views of science and government. As a result, this may help explain why both experts and non-experts alike participate in a movement that hinders climate change mitigation efforts.

While one might assume that many contrarians in our sample would have higher trust in science because of their scientific degrees, prior research has found this not necessarily to be the case. Specifically, while higher education has a “positive” effect on the views of climate change for Democrats/liberals, educational attainment has a “weaker or negative” effect on the views of Republicans/conservatives (McCright and Dunlap :{Reference McCright and Dunlap:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2011a, 175, emphasis in original). As a result, and considering the conservative nature of contrarian efforts, we believe this period may have led to unique views on government and science—specifically, government intervention into scientific matters. In other words, despite older contrarians' scientific knowledge and/or education, their subjective concern about government intervention in science may surpass objectivity regarding mainstream consensus, especially considering the pervasiveness of neoliberalism during this period.[TWO FREDS OZONE SST?]

Neoliberalism emerged as a driving force to oppose government oversight and regulation, largely related to backlash from Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and subsequent expansion of the federal government. While tenets ofneoliberalism (that is, a laissez-faire approach to the market with a heavy emphasis on deregulation and free trade) would become central to CCCM objectives, the ideology pervaded academic circles far earlier (McCright and Dunlap :{Reference McCright and Dunlap:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2011a; Oreskes and Conway :{Reference Oreskes and Conway:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2010). In fact, while the ideology is most notably associated with the creation of the Chicago School of economics, it was not unique to just Chicago. Neoliberalism was transnational in nature, permeating into other academic and political circles with the help of several institutions established solely to push this ideology (Mirowski and Plehwe :{Reference Mirowski and Plehwe:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:2009). As a result, by the 1950s, there was “an all-out assault on virtually every aspect of Keynesian economics” led, most notably, by Milton Friedman (Yergin and Stanislaw :{Reference Yergin, Stanislaw, Yergin and Stanislaw:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:1998, para. 8). By the 1960s and 1970s, neoliberalism was a prominent theory within economics and other disciplines. As a result, much like collective memories pertinent to older contrarians' formative years, it is reasonable to believe that neoliberal ideology would have impacted contrarians' attitudes toward science and government prior to the emergence of the CCCM.:{Footnote:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:-1px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline;clip:rect(0px, 0px, 0px, 0px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;width:1px;position:absolute;white-space:nowrap"):}:^14

https://boingboing.net/2019/08/11/price-of-progress.html

Between 2010 and 2016, the FDA approved 210 new medicines and every single one was produced at public expense, part of a $1T US government investment project in medical research. Despite this massive public subsidy, the pharma industry has only grown more concentrated and rapacious, raising prices and diverting the profits to their execs and investors, who now pocket 99% of industry profits: the industry made $500B in profits between 2006 and 2015, and during that time, the US government pumped $33b/year into pharma research.

The history of Big Pharma's big business is beautifully told in a long piece by Alexander Zaitchik in the New Republic. Zaitchik describes how the NIH changed its policies in 1968, ending the rule that forced publicly subsidized researchers to assign their patents to the federal government and allowing them instead to flog them on the open market. This created a new kind of academic research program, focused on using public money to develop patented products that would be exclusively assigned to pharma companies who'd be guaranteed monopolies over life-saving medicines.

That's when the Chicago School -- the origin node of neoliberalism and the worship of markets as self-correcting, self-optimizing systems that cannot and should not be regulated -- got involved, seeding a network of think-tanks and journal articles that decried competition as "wasteful duplication" and celebrated monopolies for their efficiency.

These articles created the fiction of mass private-sector investment in pharma, downplaying the taxpayer's role in subsidizing the industry and lionizing the few pennies that escaped the grasp of execs and shareholders. This mythology gave the pharma industry a rhetorical stick to beat dying customers with whenever they complained about skyrocketing prices, so the answer to these complaints was ever, "This is the price of progress." High prices may make access to medicine difficult, but without them, there'd be no medicine at all. In the early 2000s, pharma liked to talk about "the $800m pill" and today they talk about "the $2.6b pill."

It's only gotten worse under Trump, whose policies have been a bonanza for the shkreli-alike sociopaths who target monopolist pharma companies for private equity takeovers followed by mass price-hikes. When Trump allowed corporate America to repatriate the billions they'd stashed offshore at sweetheart tax rates, drug makers brought home $175b, which they primarily spent on stock buybacks and dividends that were primarily paid to hedge fund investors. Pfizer alone cashed out $10b in buybacks.

But despite this massive cash infusion, R&D spending has been flat.

Here's the hilarious part: most of this transfer of public research into private hands is undertaken through the provisions of the Bayh-Dole act. That same act imposes a duty on the US government to ensure that the "utilization and benefits" of that research should be "made available to the public on reasonable terms." In other words, the state is legally obliged to seize these drugs, price them at a reasonable level, and make them available to the public. What's a reasonable price? Well, during the Vietnam war, the Pentagon used this rule to seize key antibiotics and reimbursed the pharma companies involved at 2% of the retail price.

Today, pharma is overseen in America by Health and Human Services chief Alex Azar, who used to be CEO of Eli Lily. This swamp-gator has made a few promising noises about patent abuse, and he certainly knows where the bodies are buried, but literally betting the nation's lives on this dingo babysitter deciding not to eat the kids is pretty damned optimistic.

In 1972, Stigler organized a two-day event, “The Conference on the Regulation of the Introduction of New Pharmaceuticals.” Major drug makers like Pfizer and Upjohn pledged funds and sent delegates to the conference—a first and fateful point of contact between Pharma and the organized movement to undo the New Deal and radically remake the U.S. economy to serve an ideology of unfettered corporate power.

Born of this meeting was the echo chamber of ideas, studies, and surveys that the pharmaceutical industry has used to buffer an increasingly indefensible system against regular episodes of public outrage and political challenge. Organized and initially staffed by alumni of the Chicago conference, its hubs are the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Health Policy Research, founded 1974, and the Center for the Study of Drug Development, founded in 1976 at the University of Rochester and later moved to Tufts. Their research has succeeded in producing and policing the boundaries of the drug pricing debate, most successfully propagating the myth that high drug prices are simply the “price of progress”—carrots that drug manufacturers need to entice them to sink hundreds of millions into research and development, because drugs cannot be developed or tested any other way. In the early 2000s, these think tanks gave us the deceptive meme of the “$800 Million Pill,” a dubious claim about the “real” cost of developing a single drug, which has provided cover for, among other things, George W. Bush to sign away the government’s right to negotiate drug prices in 2004. (The same think tanks now talk about the “$2.6 Billion Pill.”)

“The point of pharma’s echo chamber was never to get the public to support monopolistic pricing,” says Nik-Khah. “As with global warming denialism, which involves many of the same institutions, the goal is to forestall regulation, in this case by sowing confusion and casting doubt about the relationship among prices, profits, innovation and patents.”

How Big Pharma Was Captured by the One Percent [Alexander Zaitchik/New Republic]

(via Naked Capitalism)

/ / 3 COMMENTS

CHICAGO SCHOOL / CORPORATISM / HAYEK / HEALTH / LATE STAGE CAPITALISM / MEDICINE / MILTON FRIEDMAN IS MARTIN SHKRELI'S SPIRITUAL FATHER / MONOPOLISM / PHARMA / SOCIOPATHS / THE ENTREPRENEURIAL STATE

dem in chains:

U chic estb by JDR (soc scin for reform) by '46 most conserv econ dept in world boast 35

Mont Pel hayek fret since 30' on appeal of social democ; 3 publ reject road to serf, but Reader's digest liked: market creates "spontaneous order" w/o gov't. frenemy of keynes; mt pel mtgs closed (some pal jrnl)

JB saw break in trust of gov't key

ch 3 -- The real purpose of the program

darden, Uva pgm to combat "social engr", collectivism; fr in law darden Irenee du pont;Am Lib league; darden vote ~ SSec

Regnery Mt pel member; Kilpatrick: wagner, soc sec act, Fair labor std act and Brown unlawful. 51 volker fund sent 1200 copies to colleges and pvt schools;

Robert Welch --> JBS

palast BDMBuy

Two Friedmans, One Pinochet and the Fairy-Tale Miracle of Chile: Questioning

Globalization's Genesis Myth

I have an advantage over globalization fetishists like Thomas Friedman, Mr. Lexus-and-

Olive- Tree. I was there at the beginning, at the moment of globalization's conception

when the sperm of Milton Friedman's oddball economic theories entered the ovum of the

fertilized mind of Ronald Reagan, who was then governor of California. I witnessed the

birth of Thatcherism before Thatcher-there, at the University of Chicago, in the early

1970s, as the only American member of an elite group later known as the "Chicago

Boys." Professor Friedman (no relation to Thomas) was the economic god who walked

among us, soon to win the Nobel Prize for his extremist laissez-faire theories. Other

academics found Friedman intriguing, but considered his free market fanaticism off the

kooky edge.

But the Chicago Boys believed; and, quite different from other students,

were handed an entire nation to experiment on, courtesy of a coup d'etat by a general in

Chile. Most of the "Boys" were Latin Americans, a strange collection in white turtleneck

sweaters and dark shades, right out of the movie Missing, who would return to Chile and

make it into a Friedmanite laboratory. ( . . . With a twist. Contrary to typical academic

exercise, those who asked questions "disappeared.")

Like Tinkerbell and Cinderella's fairy godmother, General Augusto Pinochet is reported

to have performed magical good deeds.

In the case of Pinochet, he is universally credited

with the Miracle of Chile,the wildly successful experiment in free markets, free trade,

privatization, deregulation and union-free economic expansion designed by the Chicago

Boys, whose laissez-faire seeds have spread from Santiago to Surrey, from Valparaiso to

Virginia.

Some may be a bit squeamish about the blood on his chariot, but all conservative

"reformers" must agree, globalization's free market revolution was born from the barrel

of Pinochet's guns. Whatever the general's shortcomings, they tell us, he was Chile's

economic savior and lit the world's future economic path.

:{Within the faith of the Reaganauts and Thatcherites, Pinochet's Chile serves a quasireligious

function. It provides the necessary genesis fable,}: the ersatz Eden from which the

laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining. But what if Cinderella's pumpkin did

not really turn into a coach? What if the Miracle of Chile, too, is just another fairy tale?

The current measurable failure of the economics of free markets, starvation from Quito to

Kyrgyzstan, is dismissed as the pain of "transition" to market economies. But unblinking

study discloses that the original claim to "success"-that General Pinochet begot an

economic powerhouse-is one of those utterances, like "we are winning the war on terror,"

whose truth rests entirely on its repetition.

:{Chile can claim some economic success. But that is the work of President Salvador

Allende, who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after Pinochet had him murdered.

These are the facts}:. In 1973, the year the general seized the government, Chile's

unemployment rate was 4.3 percent. In 1983, after ten years of free market

modernization, unemployment reached 22 percent. Real wages declined by 40 percent

under military rule.:{ In 1970, before Pinochet seized power, 20 percent of Chile's

population lived in poverty. By the year "President" Pinochet left office, the number of

destitute had doubled to 40 percent. Quite a miracle.}:

Pinochet did not destroy Chile's economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the

most brilliant minds in world academia, that gaggle of Milton Friedman's trainees, the

:{Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the general abolished the minimum

wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished

all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212

state industries and sixty-six banks and ran a fiscal surplus. The general goose-stepped

his nation down the "neoliberal" (free market) path, and soon Thatcher, Reagan, Bush,

Clinton, the IMF and the planet would follow.}:

But what actually happened in Chile? Freed from the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes

and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward. . . into bankruptcy. After nine

years of economics Chicago-style, Chile's industry keeled over and died.:{ In 1982 and

1983, gross domestic output dropped 19 percent. That's a depression. }:The free market

experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory

floor.

Yet, with remarkable chutzpa, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success.

In the United States, President Ronald Reagan's State Department issued a report

concluding: "Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management." Milton

Friedman himself coined the phrase "the Miracle of Chile." Friedman's sidekick,

economist Art Laffer,preened that Pinochet's Chile was "a showcase of what supply-side

economics can do."

It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of deregulation gone berserk. The

Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the nation's banks would

free them to attract foreign capital to fund industrial expansion. (A decade later, such

capital market liberalization would become the sine qua non of globalization.) On this

advice,:{Pinochet sold off the state banks-at a 40 percent discount from book value-and

they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires controlled by speculators

Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash

to buy up manufacturers then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors

panting to get their piece of the state giveaways.}:

The banks' reserves filled with hollow securities from affiliated enterprises.

Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He was persuaded that governments

should not hinder the "logic" of the market. By 1982, the Chilean pyramid finance game

was up. The Vial and Cruzat groups defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were

worthless, the currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and

desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted his beloved

Chicago experimentalists.

:{Reluctantly, the general restored the minimum wage and unions' collective bargaining

rights. Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a program

to create 500,000 jobs. The equivalent in the United States would be the government's

putting another 20 million people on the payroll. In other words, Chile was pulled from

depression by dull old Keynesian remedies-all Franklin Roosevelt, zero Ronald Reagan.}:

The junta even instituted what remains today as South America's only law restricting the

flow of foreign capital.

New Deal tactics rescued Chile from the Panic of 1983, but the

nation's long-term recovery and , nationalized banks, growth since then is the result of --cover the children's

ears-a large dose of socialism. To save the nation's pension system, Pinochet nationalized

banks and industry on a scale unimagined by the socialist Allende. The general

expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation.

New Deal scale jobs program;

While most of these businesses were eventually reprivatized, the state retained ownership

of one industry: copper.

University of Montana metals expert Dr. Janet Finn notes, "It's absurd to describe a

nation as a miracle of free enterprise when the engine of the economy remains in

government hands." (And not just any government hands.:{ A Pinochet law, still in force,

gives the military 10 percent of state copper revenues.) Copper has provided 30 to 70

percent of the nation's export earnings. This is the hard currency that has built today's

Chile, the proceeds from the mines seized from Anaconda and Kennecott in 1973-

Allende's posthumous gift to his nation.}:

:{Agribusiness is the second locomotive of Chile's economic growth. This is a legacy of the

Allende years as well. According to Professor Arturo Vasquez of Georgetown University,

Allende's land reform, that is, the breakup of feudal estates (which Pinochet could not

fully reverse), created a new class of productive tiller-owners, along with corporate and

cooperative operators, who now bring in a stream of export earnings to rival copper.}: "In

order to have an economic miracle," says Dr. Vasquez, "maybe you need a socialist

government first to commit agrarian reform."

So there we have it. Keynes and Marx, not Milton Friedman, saved Chile.

:{Half a globe away, an alternative economic experiment was succeeding quietly and

bloodlessly. The southern Indian state of Kerala is the laboratory for the humane

development theories of Amartya Sen, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize for economics.

Committed to income redistribution and universal social services, Kerala built an

economy on intensive public education.}: As the world's most literate state, it earns its hard

currency from the export of technical assistance to Gulf nations. If you've heard little...

http://www.ethosworld.com/library/Greg-Palast-The-Best-Democracy-Money-Can-Buy-%282003%29.pdf

koch recruited Hayek

milton friedman

chile pinochet

Bork

james buchanan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Chicago

...University of Chicago scholars have played a major role in the development of many academic disciplines, including: the Chicago school of economics; the Chicago school of sociology; law and economics theory in legal analysis;^[11] the Chicago school of literary criticism; the Chicago school of religion;^[12] and the behavioralism school of political science.^[13] Chicago's physics department helped develop the world's first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction (Chicago Pile-1) beneath the viewing stands of university's Stagg Field.^[14] Chicago's research pursuits are aided through its operation of world-renowned institutions, including the nearby Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory, as well as the Marine Biological Laboratory. The university is also home to the University of Chicago Press, the largest university press in the United States.^[15] With an estimated completion date of 2020, the Barack Obama Presidential Center will be housed at the university and include both the Obama presidential library and offices of the Obama Foundation.^[16]

Founded at its current location by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate John D. Rockefeller, the University of Chicago was re-incorporated in 1890 and William Rainey Harper became the university's president in 1891, while the first classes at the Hyde Park campus were held in 1892. Both Harper and future president Robert Maynard Hutchins advocated for Chicago's curriculum to be based upon theoretical and perennial issues rather than on applied sciences and commercial utility.^[17] With Harper's vision in mind, in 1900 the University of Chicago also became one of the 14 founding members of the Association of American Universities, an international organization of leading research universities^[18]

The University of Chicago has many prominent alumni, including 91 Nobel laureates^[19] who have been affiliated with the university as professors, students, faculty, or staff, the fourth most of any institution in the world. Similarly, 34 faculty members and 16 alumni have been awarded the MacArthur "Genius Grant".^[20] In addition, Chicago's alumni include 51 Rhodes Scholars,^[21] 23 Marshall Scholars,^[22] 9 Fields Medalists,^[23] 20 National Humanities Medalists,^[24] 13 billionaire graduates and a plethora of members of the United States Congress and heads of state of countries all over the world.^[25]

History:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

Main article: History of the University of Chicago

1920s–1980s:{:(style="margin-right:0.25em"):}:[edit:{]}:

In 1929, the university's fifth president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, took office; the university underwent many changes during his 24-year tenure. Hutchins eliminated varsity football from the university in an attempt to emphasize academics over athletics,^[49] instituted the undergraduate college's liberal-arts curriculum known as the Common Core,^[50] and organized the university's graduate work into four divisions.^[49] In 1933, Hutchins proposed an unsuccessful plan to merge the University of Chicago and Northwestern University into a single university.^[51] During his term, the University of Chicago Hospitals (now called the University of Chicago Medical Center) finished construction and enrolled its first medical students.^[52] Also, the Committee on Social Thought, an institution distinctive of the university, was created.

It has been noted that the University of Chicago did not provide standard oversight regarding}: Bruno Bettelheim and his tenure as director of the Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children from 1944 to 1973.^{[55][56][57][58][59][60][61]}Money that had been raised during the 1920s and financial backing from the Rockefeller Foundation helped the school to survive through the Great Depression.^[49] During World War II, the university made important contributions to the Manhattan Project.^[53] The university was the site of the first isolation of plutonium and of the creation of the first artificial, self-sustained nuclear reaction by Enrico Fermi in 1942.^[53][54]

In the early 1950s, student applications declined as a result of increasing crime and poverty in the Hyde Park neighborhood. In response, the university became a major sponsor of a controversial urban renewalproject for Hyde Park, which profoundly affected both the neighborhood's architecture and street plan.^[62] During this period the university, like Shimer College and 10 others, adopted an early entrant program that allowed very young students to attend college; in addition, students enrolled at Shimer were enabled to transfer automatically to the University of Chicago after their second year, having taken comparable or identical examinations and courses.

The university experienced its share of student unrest during the 1960s, beginning in 1962, when then-freshman Bernie Sanders helped lead a 15-day sit-in at the college's administration building in a protest over the university's off-campus rental policies. After continued turmoil, a university committee in 1967 issued what became known as the Kalven Report. The report, a two-page statement of the university's policy in "social and political action," declared that "To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures."^[63] The report has since been used to justify decisions such as the university's refusal to divest from South Africa in the 1980s and Darfur in the late 2000s.^[64]

In 1969, more than 400 students, angry about the dismissal of a popular professor, Marlene Dixon, occupied the Administration Building for two weeks. After the sit-in ended, when Dixon turned down a one-year reappointment, 42 students were expelled and 81 were suspended,^[65] the most severe response to student occupations of any American university during the student movement.^[66]

In 1978, Hanna Holborn Gray, then the provost and acting president of Yale University, became President of the University of Chicago, a position she held for 15 years.^[67]

The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought is one of several PhD-granting committees at the University of Chicago. It was started in 1941 by historian John Ulric Nef along with economist Frank Knight, anthropologist Robert Redfield, and University President Robert Maynard Hutchins.

The committee is interdisciplinary, but it is not centered on any specific topic; rather, the committee has, since its inception, drawn together noted academics and writers to "foster awareness of the permanent questions at the origin of all learned inquiry".^[1]

Notable past members of the committee have included

writers Saul Bellow, J. M. Coetzee, and T. S. Eliot,
political theorists Hannah Arendt, Allan Bloom, and Mark Lilla,
classicist David Grene,
historians Marc Fumaroli, Marshall G. S. Hodgson and Paul Wheatley,
sociologist Edward Shils,
sinologist Anthony C. Yu,
anthropologist Victor Turner,
poet and philologist A. K. Ramanujan,
philosophers Vincent Descombes, Mircea Eliade, Leszek Kołakowski, Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, Paul Ricoeur, Stephen Toulmin, and
economists Robert Fogel and Friedrich Hayek.

Eliot, Bellow, Coetzee, Hayek, and Fogel have been awarded Nobel prizes.

Current faculty include religion scholar Wendy Doniger, theologian David Tracy, sociologist Hans Joas, literary theorist Thomas Pavel, theorist of German literature David Wellbery, classicist James M. Redfield, philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, medieval historian David Nirenberg, philosopher Robert B. Pippin, classicist Laura M. Slatkin, historian of science Lorraine Daston, physician and philosopher Leon Kass (former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics), political theorist Nathan Tarcov, art historian Andrei Pop, and poet Adam Zagajewski.

new:

http://exiledonline.com/monster-koch-bust-charles-koch-used-social-security-to-lure-friedrich-von-hayek-to-america/

MONSTER KOCH BUST: CHARLES KOCH USED SOCIAL SECURITY TO LURE FRIEDRICH VON HAYEK TO AMERICA

By Yasha Levine and Mark Ames

“Ha-ha! Those suckers will believe anything! “

This article appeared in the October 17, 2011 edition of The Nation

There’s right-wing hypocrisy, and then there’s this: Charles Koch, billionaire patron of free-market libertarianism, privately championed the benefits of Social Security to Friedrich Hayek, the leading laissez-faire economist of the twentieth century. Koch even sent Hayek a government pamphlet to help him take advantage of America’s federal retirement insurance and healthcare programs.

This extraordinary correspondence regarding Social Security began in early June 1973, weeks after Koch was appointed president of the Institute for Humane Studies. Along with his brothers, Koch inherited his father’s privately held oil company in 1967, becoming one of the richest men in America. He used this fortune to help turn the IHS, then based in Menlo Park, California, into one of the world’s foremost libertarian think tanks. Soon after taking over as president, Koch invited Hayek to serve as the institute’s “distinguished senior scholar” in preparation for its first conference on Austrian economics, to be held in June 1974.

Hayek initially declined Koch’s offer. In a letter to IHS secretary Kenneth Templeton Jr., dated June 16, 1973, Hayek explains that he underwent gall bladder surgery in Austria earlier that year, which only heightened his fear of “the problems (and costs) of falling ill away from home.” (Thanks to waves of progressive reforms, postwar Austria had near universal healthcare and robust social insurance plans that Hayek would have been eligible for.)

IHS vice president George Pearson (who later became a top Koch Industries executive) responded three weeks later, conceding that it was all but impossible to arrange affordable private medical insurance for Hayek in the United States. However, thanks to research by Yale Brozen, a libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, Pearson happily reported that “social security was passed at the University of Chicago while you [Hayek] were there in 1951. You had an option of being in the program. If you so elected at that time, you may be entitled to coverage now.”

A few weeks later, the institute reported the good news: Professor Hayek had indeed opted into Social Security while he was teaching at Chicago and had paid into the program for ten years. He was eligible for benefits.

On August 10, 1973, Koch wrote a letter appealing to Hayek to accept a shorter stay at the IHS, hard-selling Hayek on Social Security’s retirement benefits, which Koch encouraged Hayek to draw on even outside America. He also assured Hayek that Medicare, which had been created in 1965 by the Social Security amendments as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, would cover his medical needs.

Koch writes: “You may be interested in the information that we uncovered on the insurance and other benefits that would be available to you in this country. Since you have paid into the United States Social Security Program for a full forty quarters, you are entitled to Social Security payments while living anywhere in the Free World. Also, at any time you are in the United States, you are automatically entitled to hospital coverage.”

Then, taking on the unlikely role of Social Security Administration customer service rep, Koch adds, “In order to be eligible for medical coverage you must apply during the registration period which is anytime from January 1 to March 31. For your further information, I am enclosing a pamphlet on Social Security.”

* * *

The private correspondence between two of the most important figures shaping the Republican Party’s economic policies—billionaire libertarian Charles Koch and Nobel Prize–winning economist Friedrich Hayek, godfather of today’s free-market movement—were obtained by Yasha Levine from the Hayek archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This is the first time the content of these letters has been reported on.

The documents offer a rare glimpse into how these two major free-market apostles privately felt about government assistance programs—revealing a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.

Charles Koch and his brother, David, have waged a three-decade campaign to dismantle the American social safety net. At the center of their most recent push is the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity, which has co-sponsored Tea Party events, spearheaded the war against healthcare reform and supported Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attack on public sector unions. FreedomWorks, another conservative group central to the rise of the Tea Party and the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, emerged from an advocacy outfit founded by the Koch brothers called Citizens for a Sound Economy. FreedomWorks now exists as a separate entity that champions the “Austrian school” of economics.

Hayek, a founder of that school of thought, is primarily known for two major works. The first, The Road to Serfdom (1944), grudgingly accepts the possibility that some “free” countries might find it necessary to set up a bare-minimum catastrophic social insurance program limited to the very neediest, so long as the benefits do not incentivize productive members of society to abandon free-market retirement savings or medical insurance.

Hayek’s comparatively liberal attitude toward social insurance hardened considerably by the time he published his 1960 opus, The Constitution of Liberty. Despite privately spending the intervening years paying into Social Security, Hayek devoted an entire chapter—titled “Social Security”—to denouncing the modern welfare state as a gateway to tyranny and moral decay. Ironically, one of Hayek’s main objections to government programs like Social Security was the “fundamental absurdity” of using tax dollars to promote their benefits. In other words, Hayek publicly objected to the kind of brochure that Charles Koch sent him. In their private correspondence, however, we could find no objection to this “fundamental absurdity.”

By the mid-1970s, Hayek had fully distanced himself from the modest benefits he’d originally conceded to in The Road to Serfdom. In his preface to the 1976 edition, he explained his “error”: “I had not wholly freed myself from all the current interventionist superstitions, and in consequence still made various concessions which I now think unwarranted.”

Publicly, in academia and in politics, in the media and in propaganda, these two major figures—one the sponsor, the other the mandarin—have been pushing Americans to do away with Social Security and Medicare for our own good: we will become freer, richer, healthier and better people.

But the exchange between Koch and Hayek exposes the bad-faith nature of their public arguments. In private, Koch expresses confidence in Social Security’s ability to care for a clearly worried Hayek. He and his fellow IHS libertarians repeatedly assure Hayek that his government-funded coverage in the United States would be adequate for his medical needs.None of them—not Koch, Hayek or the other libertarians at the IHS—express anything remotely resembling shame or unease at such a betrayal of their public ideals and writings. Nowhere do they worry that by opting into and taking advantage of Social Security programs they might be hastening a socialist takeover of America. It’s simply a given that Social Security and Medicare work, and therefore should be used.

* * *

Shortly after this exchange, in 1974, Hayek won the Nobel Prize in economics. The next year he went on something of a victory tour of the United States, which ended at the IHS, where he spent the summer as a resident scholar. Hayek returned to Menlo Park again in the summer of 1977. The Nation has filed a Freedom of Information Request with the Social Security Administration to discover if, in fact, Hayek received Social Security payments or used Medicare during his residencies at the institute or at any other time. At press time, these requests have not been answered.

Meanwhile, in 1974, Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute (called the Charles Koch Foundation until 1977). This think tank has done more than any other to push for an end to Social Security. In 1983 the Cato Journalpublished a blueprint of how to destroy Social Security,“Achieving a ‘Leninist Strategy,’” by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis. The authors acknowledged that a strong coalition of Americans backed Social Security and thus saw the need for “guerrilla warfare against both the current Social Security system and the coalition that supports it.” Victory could be far in the future, “but then, as Lenin well knew, to be a successful revolutionary, one must also be patient and consistently plan for real reform,” they write.

As part of Cato’s campaign, the institute has launched various groups and projects, including the Project on Social Security Choice, whose co-chair is José Piñera, architect of AugustoPinochet’s controversial pension privatization scheme in Chile. Cato Institute members and alumni also dominatedPresident George W. Bush’s commissionon Social Security in his first term and spearheaded Bush’s failed attempt to privatize the program in the early months of his second term.

Thanks in part to Hayek’s writings and to the Koch brothers’ decades-long war on the social safety net, Americans are among the Western world’s few citizens without universal healthcare. Not surprisingly, life expectancy here has fallen to forty-ninth place in the world, while medical costs are double those of other Western nations. By contrast, Hayek’s native Austria, which has a public health plan that covers 99 percent of the population, boasts a healthcare system ranked ninth in the world by the World Health Organization.

* * *

When Texas Governor Rick Perry, a front-runner in the Republican primary for president, derides Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” or a “monstrous lie,” that rhetoric can be traced back to the work of Hayek and Koch. And yet we now know that in private practice, Hayek was perfectly content to pay into Social Security and that Koch encouraged him to draw upon both Social Security and Medicare. Did they really believe what they wrote? Or were these attacks just scare-talk meant for the rubes, for you and us, “the public”?

Calling this mere hypocrisy downplays the seriousness of their fraud. Koch and Hayek are no more hypocritical than the used-car salesman who knowingly sells a lemon to a gullible buyer, or the financial agency that rates “AAA” instruments it knows are crap. This is a grand swindle played on a trusting, gullible public, a scam whose goal is to con America’s dying middle class into handing over their retirement money to the richest 0.1 percent, convincing them that in doing so, they’re “empowering” themselves and protecting their “individual liberty.”

Another question hangs over all this: Why didn’t Charles Koch offer to put up some of his enormous wealth to pay for Hayek’s temporary medical insurance? One obvious answer: because the state had already offered a better and freer program. But perhaps Koch’s stinginess also reveals the social ethic behind libertarian values: every man for himself; selfishness is a virtue.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/01/the-university-of-chicago-is-a-moral-cesspool/

It is now a matter of public record that immediately after the terrible tragedy of September 11, 2001, U.S. Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld and his pro-Israeli “Neoconservative” Deputy Paul Wolfowitz began to plot, plan, scheme and conspire to wage a war of aggression against Iraq by manipulating the tragic events of September 11th in order to provide a pretext for doing so. Of course Iraq had nothing at all to do with September 11th or supporting Al-Qaeda . But that made no difference to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the numerous other pro-Israeli Neo-cons in the Bush Jr. administration.

These pro-Israeli Neo-cons had been schooled in the Machiavellian/Nietzschean theories of Professor Leo Strauss, who taught political philosophy at the University of Chicago in their Department of Political Science. The best expose of Strauss’s pernicious theories on law, politics, government, for elitism, and against democracy can be found in two scholarly books by the Canadian Professor Shadia B. Drury: The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988); Leo Strauss and the American Right (1999). I entered the University of Chicago in September of 1968 shortly after Strauss had retired. But I was trained in Chicago’s Political Science Department by Strauss’s foremost protege, co-author, and literary executor Joseph Cropsey. Based upon my personal experience as an alumnus of Chicago’s Political Science Department (A.B., 1971, in Political Science), I concur completely with Professor Drury’s devastating critique of Strauss. I also agree with her penetrating analysis of the degradation of the American political process by Chicago’s Straussian cabal.

Chicago routinely trained me and numerous other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. The University of Chicago became the “brains” behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his “lawyers” at the Department of Injustice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka “Feddies”), which originated in part at the University of Chicago.

Although miseducated at Yale and Harvard Business School, the “Ivies” proved to be too liberal for Bush Jr. and his fundamentalist Christian supporters, whose pointman and spearcarrier in the Bush Jr. administration was Ashcroft, a Fundiehimself. The Neo-cons and the Fundies contracted an “unholy alliance” in support of Bush Jr. across the board. For their own different reasons, both groups also worked hand-in-hand to support Israel’s genocidal Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, an internationally acknowledged war criminal. Strange bedfellows indeed.

According to his own public estimate and boast before the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush Jr. hired about 20 Straussians to occupy key positions in his administration, many holding offices where they could push American foreign policy in favor of Israel and against its chosen enemies such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the Palestinians. It was the Chicago Straussian cabal of pro-Israeli Neo-cons who set up a separate “intelligence” unit within the Pentagon that was responsible for manufacturing many of the bald-faced lies, deceptions, half-truths, and outright propaganda that the Bush Jr. administration then disseminated to the lap-dog U.S. news media in order to generate public support for a war of aggression against Iraq for the benefit of Israel and in order to steal Iraq’s oil. To paraphrase something Machiavelli once advised his Prince in Chapter XVIII of that book: Those who want to deceive will always find those willing to be deceived. As I can attest from my personal experience as an alumnus of the University of Chicago Department of Political Science, the Bible of Chicago’s pro-Israeli Neo-con Straussian cabal is Machiavelli’s The Prince.

As for the University of Chicago overall, its Bible is Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987). Of course Bloom was another protege of Strauss, as well as a mentor to Wolfowitz. In his latest novel Ravelstein (2000) Saul Bellow, formerly on the University of Chicago Faculty, outed his self-styled friend Bloom as a hedonist, pederast, and most promiscuous homosexual who died of AIDS. All this was common knowledge at the University of Chicago, where Bloom is still worshipped and his elitist screed against American higher-education still revered. In Ravelstein Wolfowitz appeared as Bloom’s protege Philip Gorman, and Strauss as Bloom’s mentor and guru Professor Davarr. Strauss/Davarr is really the eminence grise of the novel. With friends like Bellow, Bloom did not need enemies.

Just recently the University of Chicago officially celebrated its Bush Jr. Straussian cabal, highlighting Wolfowitz Ph.D. ’72, Ahmad Chalabi, Ph.D. ’69, Abram Shulsky, A.M. ’68, Ph.D. ’72, Zalmay Khalilzad, Ph.D. ’79, together with faculty members Bellow, X ’39 and Bloom, A.B. ’49, A.M. ’53, Ph.D. ’55. According to the June 2003 University of Chicago Magazine, Bloom’s book “helped popularize Straussian ideals of democracy.” It is correct to assert that Bloom’s rant helped to popularize Straussian “ideas,” but they were blatantly anti-democratic, Machiavellian, Nietzschean, and elitist to begin with. Only the University of Chicago would have the unmitigated Orwellian gall to publicly claim that Strauss and Bloom cared one whit about democracy, let alone comprehended the “ideals of democracy.”

Does anyone seriously believe that the Chicago/Strauss/Bloom product Wolfowitz cares one whit about democracy in Iraq? Or the Bush Jr. administration itself, after having stolen the 2000 presidential election from the American People in Florida and before the Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court, some of whom were Feddies? Do not send your children to the University of Chicago where they will grow up to become warmongers like Wolfowitz or totalitarians like Ashcroft! Chicago is an intellectual and moral cesspool.

Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of Foundations of World Order, Duke University Press, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, by Clarity Press. He can be reached at: FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU

OLD:

chicago pile one squash ct fermi graphite cadmium M@M atomic bomb 1942

capt 917

oops red lost

great books?

cf powell memo; 2 1st big beachheads uchic and GMU?

http://www.alternet.org/economy/bernie-sanders-right-wing-ideology-rules-our-economy

For over 40 years, In These Times has published incisive reporting and analysis on one of the defining issues of our time: the crisis of inequality. Our new book, The Age of Inequality: Corporate America’s War on Working People, brings together In These Times’ best writing on the topic from leading thinkers and journalists. In this selection, originally published in 2009, Bernie Sanders writes about the intellectual failures, and simultaneous political success, of the “Chicago School’s” greatest avatar, Milton Friedman.

“THE FAILED PROPHET” (2009)

THE LATE MILTON FRIEDMANWAS A PROVOCATIVE TEACHER AT MY ALMA MATER, THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. He got his students involved with their studies. He was a gifted writer and communicator. And he received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to economics.

But Friedman was more than an academic. He was an advocate for, and popularizer of, a radical right-wing economic ideology.

In today’s political and social reality, the University of Chicago’s establishment of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute (in the building that until now has housed the renowned Chicago Theological Seminary) will not be perceived as simply a sign of appreciation for a prominent former faculty member. Instead, by founding such an institution, the university signals that it isaligning itself with a reactionary political program supported by the wealthiest, greediest, and most powerful people and institutions in this country.Friedman’s ideology caused enormous damage to the American middle class and to working families here and around the world. It is not an ideology that a great institution like the University of Chicago should be seeking to advance.

Those who defend the Milton Friedman Institute will assure us that it will encourage a free and open exchange of ideas. That may very well be true. But if the goal of the institute is simply to do nonideological research, there are a lot of names that one could come up with other than that of the most polemical and ideological economist of his time.

My suspicions only deepen when I read on the University of Chicago website that donors who contribute more than $1 million to the project will have a special relationship with the institute as members of a Milton Friedman Society and will be expected to facilitate the institution’s “connections to leaders in business and government.”

I work in Washington, D.C., and I know about the power that big money has over process. When the insurance companies and the drug companies and the oil companies and the banks and the military-industrial complex make contributions to political campaigns, we usually know exactly what it is they want in return.

The timing of this project is a little ironic. Friedman earned his bread by denouncing government at virtually every turn. He, like his acolyte, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, believed that a largely unregulated free market constituted the most superior form of economic organization imaginable. Well, the tune of the right-wing free marketeers has changed a bit in the last few months.

My colleagues in the Senate and I are now picking up the pieces of a banking system brought to the edge of collapse by this theory of deregulation and by the insatiable greed of a small number of wealthy financiers playing in the market and engaging in incredibly risky—if not illegal—behavior.

In the rush to bail out Wall Street, we saw President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the people in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—folks who loved Friedman’s ideas and who, no doubt, would be prepared to financially support a Milton Friedman Institute—reverse their longstanding rhetorical opposition to government intervention.

Instead, they demanded that we come to the rescue of the financial firms that had lined up in front of Congress for their emergency welfare checks.

For years, all of these people, including the president of the United States, have been telling us that government should not be involved in ensuring health care for all Americans as a right of citizenship. (“What a terrible idea!”) They have been telling us that the government should not be involved in making quality education affordable to all people; that the government should not be empowered to ensure that we reverse greenhouse gas emissions; that the government should not regulate pollution that contaminates our air and water and land; and that the government should not provide a strong safety net for our children, for our seniors, or for the disabled.

But the issue here is not just economic policy. It goes deeper than that. It touches on the core of who we are as a society and as a people. Are we as human beings supposed to turn around and not see the suffering that so many of our brothers and sisters are experiencing? Are we content to be living in a nation where, thanks in part to the Friedmanite ideology, the richest 1 percent owns more than the bottom 90 percent and the top one-tenth percent owns more than the bottom 50 percent?Well, it turns out that when the shoe is pinching their foot, they have become the strongest believers in government intervention—especially if working people and the middle class are bailing them out.

With all due respect to the late Milton Friedman, his economic program is nothing more than a wish list for the greediest, the most monied interests in our society. At the same time that this ideology is supported by the rich and powerful—except when they’re lining up in Washington for their welfare checks—this same ideology is almost unanimously opposed by working families and middle-class people across this country.

What would some of the items on Friedman’s wish list be? First of all, the Friedmanites would be supportive of the concept of a culture of greed. They want people making billions of dollars on the covers of Time and Newsweekbecause these people are supposed to be our national heroes. We are not supposed to recognize a teacher who makes $40,000 a year opening up the minds of young people. We are not supposed to recognize a childcare worker who makes $18,000 a year giving poor children an opportunity to grow intellectually and emotionally. Those jobs are not considered important work.

But if you’re a billionaire on Wall Street creating exotic financial instruments that end up being worth nothing, you are considered a hero. The fact that this culture of greed has permeated our political culture means that corporate CEOs can now earn more than 400 times what their workers earn without fearing a political backlash.

Now we have a case study for what happens when the ideology of Milton Friedman becomes the operating ideology of the government. Under Bush, the median family income has declined by thousands of dollars. Millions of Americans have entered the ranks of the poor. Some 7 million have lost their health insurance. Some 3 million have lost their pensions. And the gap between the very rich and everybody else has grown much wider.

Our country is due for a transformation. We have endured years of right-wing ideology, and we are eager to move in a different direction. I believe that we will see a major reordering of social and economic priorities and that this last general election represented a repudiation of right-wing economic arguments.

In the Bush era—a period in which some of Friedman’s greatest admirers managed the U.S. economy—the top 400 families in this country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion.

Yet we have children in this country who have no health care, children who are undernourished, and children who sleep out on the streets. From an economic perspective, from a moral perspective, and from a philosophical perspective, the ideology of Milton Friedman is dead wrong.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2006/11/17/the-road-from-serfdom/

Milton Friedman had no idea that his six-day trip to Chile in March 1975 would generate so much controversy. He was invited to Santiago by a group of Chilean economists who over the previous decades had been educated at the University of Chicago, in a program set up by Friedman’s colleague, Arnold Harberger.Two years after the overthrow of Allende, with the dictatorship unable to get inflation under control, the “Chicago Boys” began to gain real influence in General Augusto Pinochet’s military government. They recommended the application of what Friedman had already taken to call “shock treatment” or a “shock program” immediately halting the printing of money to finance the budget deficit, cutting state spending twenty to twenty-five percent, laying off tens of thousands of government workers, ending wage and price controls, privatizing state industries, and deregulating capital markets. “Complete free trade,” Friedman advised.

Friedman and Harberger were flown down to “help to sell” the plan to the military junta, which despite its zealous defense of the abstraction of free enterprise was partial to corporatismand the maintenance of a large state sector. Friedman gave a series of lectures and met with Pinochet for 45 minutes, where the general “indicated very little indeed about his own or the government’s feeling.” Although he noted that the dictator, responsible for the torture of tens of thousands of Chileans, seemed “sympathetically attracted to the idea of a shock treatment.”

Friedman returned home to a firestorm of protest, aggravated by his celebrity as a Newsweek columnist and ongoing revelations about Washington’s and corporate America’s involvement in the overthrow of Allende. Not only hadNixon, the CIA, and ITT, along with other companies, plotted to destabilize Allende’s “democratic road to socialism,” but now a renowned University of Chicago economist, whose promotion of the wonders of the free market was heavily subsidized by corporations such as Bechtel,Pepsico, Getty, Pfizer, General Motors, W.R. Grace, and Firestone,was advising the dictator who overthrew him on how to complete the counterrevolution at the cost of skyrocketing unemployment among Chile’s poor.

The New York Times identified Friedman as the “guiding light of the junta’s economic policy,” while columnist Anthony Lewis asked: if “pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?” At his university, the Spartacus Youth League pledged to “drive Friedman off campus through protest and exposure,” while the student government, replicating their own version of the Church Commission hearings that was just then investigating US crimes in Chile, convened a “Commission of Inquiry on the Friedman/Harberger Issue.” Everywhere in the press the name Friedman was paired with the adjectives “draconian” and “shock,” with small but persistent protests dogging the professor at many of his public appearances.

In letters to various editors and detractors, Friedman downplayed the extent of his involvement in Chile, fingering Harberger as more directly involved in the mentoring of Chilean economists. While defensive, he nevertheless reveled in the controversy and the frisson of being ushered into speaking engagements via kitchens and back doors to avoid demonstrators. He enjoyed exposing the double standard of “liberal McCarthyism,” pointing out that he was never criticized for giving similar advice to Red China, the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia. In recounting an episode when a man was dragged out of the Nobel award ceremony after shouting “down with capitalism, freedom for Chile,” Friedman delighted in noting that the protest backfired, resulting in his receiving “twice as long an ovation” than any other laureate.

Friedman defended his relationship with Pinochet by saying that if Allende had been allowed to remain in office Chileans would have suffered “the elimination of thousands and perhaps mass starvation . . . torture and unjust imprisonment.” But the elimination of thousands, mass hunger, torture and unjust imprisonment were what was taking place in Chile exactly at the moment the Chicago economist was defending his protégé.

Allende’s downfall came because he refused to betray Chile’s long democratic tradition and invoke martial law, yet Friedman nevertheless insisted that the military junta offered “more room for individual initiative and for a private sphere of life” and thus a greater “chance of a return to a democratic society.” It was pure boilerplate, but it did give Friedman a chance to rehearse his understanding of the relationship between capitalism and freedom.

Critics of both Pinochet and Friedman took Chile as proof positive that the kind of free-market absolutism advocated by the Chicago School was only possible through repression.So Friedman countered by redefining the meaning of freedom. Contrary to the prevailing post-WWII belief that political liberty was dependent on some form of mild social leveling, he insisted that “economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom.”

More than his monetarist theorems, this equation of “capitalism and freedom” was his greatest contribution to the rehabilitation of conservatism in the 1970s. Where pre-New Deal conservatives positioned themselves in defense of social hierarchy, privilege, and order, post-WWII conservatives instead celebrated the free market as a venue of creativity and liberty. Such a formulation today stands at the heart of the conservative movement, having been accepted as commonsense by mainline politicians and opinion makers. It is likewise enshrined in Bush’s National Security Strategy, which mentions “economic freedom” more than twice as many times as it does “political freedom.”

While he was in Chile Friedman gave a speech titled “The Fragility of Freedom” where he described the “role in the destruction of a free society that was played by the emergence of the welfare state.” Chile’s present difficulties, he argued, “were due almost entirely to the forty-year trend toward collectivism, socialism and the welfare state . . . a course that would lead to coercion rather than freedom.” The Pinochet regime, he argued, represented a turning point in a protracted campaign, a tearing off of democracy’s false husks to reach true freedom’s inner core. “The problem is not of recent origin,” Friedman wrote in a follow-up letter to Pinochet, but “arises from trends toward socialism that started forty years ago, and reached their logical and terrible climax in the Allende regime.” He praised the general for putting Chile back on the “right track” with the “many measures you have already taken to reverse this trend.”

Friedman understood the struggle to be a long one, and indeed some of the first recruits for the battle of Chile were conscripted decades earlier. With financial funding from the US government’s Point Four foreign aid program and the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago’s Department of Economics set up scholarship programs in the mid-1950s with Chile’s Catholic and public universities. About one hundred select students between 1957 and 1970 received close, hands-on training, first in an apprenticeship program in Chile and then in post-graduate work in Chicago. In principle, Friedman and his colleagues opposed the kind of developmental largesse that funded the exchange program as a market distortion, yet they took the cash to finance their department’s graduate program. But they also had a more idealistic purpose.

Starting in the 1950s, Latin America, particularly the southern cone countries of Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, had become a laboratory for developmentalist economics. Social scientists, such as the Argentine Raúl Prebisch from his position as head of the UN’s Economic Commission on Latin America, expanded Keynesianism after John Maynard Keynes, who elaborated the dominant post-WWII economic framework that envisioned an active role for the state in the workings of the market — beyond its focus on managing countervailing cycles of inflation and unemployment to question the terms of international trade. Chronic inflation, according to Prebisch and other Latin American economists, was understood not to be a reflex of any given country’s irresponsible monetary system but a symptom of deep structural inequalities that divided the global economy between the developed and the undeveloped world. Volatile commodity prices and capital investment reinforced first world advantage and third world disadvantage.

Economists and politicians from across the political spectrum accepted the need for state planning, regulation, and intervention. Such ideas not only drove the economic policies of developing nations, but echoed throughout the corridors and conference rooms of the UN and the World Bank, as well as in the non-aligned movement’s 1973 call for a New International Economic Order.

It was the Chicago School’s vision of hell, the New Deal writ large across the world stage. These ideas “fell like a bomb” on those who had long stood against Keynesianism at home only now to see its authority spread globally. The Chilean scholarship program was intended to counter such a vision. “University of Chile economists have been followers of Keynes and Prebisch more than of Marx,” wrote former University of Chicago president and State Department director of overseas education programs William Benton, and “the Chicago influence” will “introduce a third basic viewpoint, that of contemporary ‘market economics.'”

Students returned to Chile not just with a well-rounded education in classical economics but with a burning dedication to carry the faith to benighted lands. They purged the economics departments of their universities of developmentalists and began to set up free-market institutes and think tanks the Center for Social and Economic Studies, for example, and the Foundation for Liberty and Development  funded, as their counterparts in the US were, by corporate money. They understood their mission in continental terms, committed, as Chicago alum Ernesto Fontaine put it, “to expand throughout Latin America, confronting the ideological positions which prevented freedom and perpetuated poverty and backwardness.”

The program, which brought up students from universities in Argentina as well, is an example of the erratic nature of both public and private US diplomacy, conforming as it does to competing power interests within American society. At the same time that Kennedy was promoting Alliance for Progress reform capitalism, he was training and funding the men and institutions that would constitute the continent’s dense network of death squads.

At the same time that Chase Manhattan, Chemical, Manufacturers Hanover, and Morgan Guaranty were promoting, through the establishment of the Trilateral Commission, a more conciliatory economic policy in the third world, they were cutting off credit to Chile, making, in accordance with Nixon’s directive, its economy “scream.” And at the same time that every American president from Truman to Nixon was embracing Keynesianism, the University of Chicago’s Economics Department, with financial support from the US government, had turned itself into free-market madrassa that indoctrinated a generation of Latin American economists to spearhead an international capitalist insurgency.

Throughout the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, though, the revolution seemed to be forever deferred. In the late 1960s, the Chicago Boys had drawn up the platform of Allende’s nationalist opponent in the 1970 election, which included many of the proposals that eventually would be implemented under Pinochet. But Allende won, so Chile had to wait. In the meantime, the military junta in Brazil, which took power in 1964, had invited Friedman in 1973 down for advice, which it took for awhile.

A severe recession and skyrocketing unemployment followed. Friedman pronounced this first application of “shock therapy” an “economic miracle.” But the generals, wisely it seems, demurred, returning to its state-directed program of industrialization that, while failing to curb inflation, did lower unemployment and lay the foundations for Brazil’s current economic dominance of Latin America.

Richard Nixon too, early in his first term, showed promise, but then he raised tariffs, introduced wage and price controls and, with an eye to the 1972 election, declared himself a Keynesian and opened up the money spout. Nixon was an “enormous disappointment,” reflected Friedman.

That left Pinochet, not the most reputable of characters but willing to go the distance.Chile became, according to Business Week, a “laboratory experiment” for taming inflation through monetary control, carrying out, said Barrons, the “most important modifications implemented in the developing world in recent times.” American economists may have been writing “treatises” on the “way the world should work, but it is another country that is putting it into effect.”

A month after Friedman’s visit, the Chilean junta announced that inflation would be stopped “at any cost.” The regime cut government spending twenty-seven percent, practically shuttered the national mint, and set fire to bundles of escudos. The state divested from the banking system and deregulated finance, including interest rates. It slashed import tariffs, freed prices on over 2000 products, and removed restrictions against foreign investments.

Pinochet pulled Chile out of a number of alliances with neighboring countries intended to promote regional industrialization, turning his country into a gateway for the introduction of cheap goods into Latin America. Tens of thousands of public workers lost their jobs as the government auctioned off, in what amounted to a spectacular transfer of wealth to the private sector, over four hundred state industries. Multinationals were not only granted the right to repatriate one hundred percent of their profits, but were given guaranteed exchange rates to help them do so. In order to build investor confidence, the escudo was fixed to the dollar. Within four years, nearly thirty percent of all property expropriated not just under Allende but under a previous Alliance for Progress land reform was returned to previous owners. New laws treated labor like any other “free” commodity, sweeping away four decades of progressive union legislation. Health care was privatized, as was the public pension fund.

GNP plummeted thirteen percent, industrial production fell 28 percent, and purchasing power collapsed to forty percent of its 1970 level. One national business after another went bankrupt. Unemployment soared.

Yet by 1978 the economy rebounded, expanding thirty-two percent between 1978 and 1981. Though salary levels remained close to twenty percent below what they were a decade previously, per capita income began to climb again. Perhaps even a better indicator of progress, torture and extrajudicial executions began to taper off. With hindsight, however, it is now clear that the Chicago economists, despite the credit they received for three years of economic growth, had set Chile on the road to near collapse.

The rebound of the economy was a function of the liberalization of the financial system and massive foreign investment. That investment, it turns out, led to a speculative binge, monopolization of the banking system, and heavy borrowing. The deluge of foreign capital did allow the fixed exchange rate to be maintained for a short period. But sharp increases in private debt rising from $2 billion in 1978 to over $14 billion in 1982 — put unsustainable pressure on Chile’s currency. Pegged as it was to the appreciating US dollar, the value of the escudo was kept artificially high, leading to a flood of cheap imports. While consumers took advantage of liberalized credit to purchase TVs, cars, and other high-ticket items, savings shrank, debt increased, exports fell, and the trade deficit ballooned.

In 1982 things fell apart. Copper prices plummeted, accelerating Chile’s balance of trade deficit. GDP plunged fifteen percent, while industrial production rapidly contracted. Bankruptcies tripled and unemployment hit 30 percent. Despite his pledge to hold firm, Pinochet devalued the escudo, devastating poor Chileans who had either availed themselves to liberalized credit to borrow in dollars or who held their savings in escudos. The Central Bank lost forty-five percent of its reserves, while the private banking system collapsed. The crisis forced the state, dusting off laws still on the books from the Allende period, to take over nearly seventy percent of the banking system and reimpose controls on finance, industry, prices and wages. Turning to the IMF for a bailout, Pinochet extended a public guarantee to repay foreign creditors and banks.

But before the crisis of 1982, there were the golden years between 1978 and 1981. Just as the international left flocked to Chile during the Allende period, under Pinochet the country became a mecca for the free-market right. Economists, political scientists, and journalists came to witness the “miracle” first hand, holding up Chile as a model to be implemented throughout the world. Representatives from European and American banks poured into Santiago, paying tribute to Pinochet by restoring credit that was denied the heretic Allende. The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank extolled Chile as a paragon of responsibility, advancing it 46 loans between 1976 and 1986 for over $3.1 billion.

In addition to money men, right-wing activists traveled to Chile in a show of solidarity with the Pinochet regime.Publisher of the National Review William Rusher, along with other cadres who eventually coalesced around Reagan’s 1976 and 1980 bids for the Republican nomination, organized the American-Chilean Council, a solidarity committee to counter critical press coverage in the US of Pinochet. “I was unable to find a single opponent of the regime in Chile,” Rusher wrote after a 1978 pilgrimage, “who believes the Chilean government engages” in torture. As to the “interim human discomfort” caused by radical free-market policies, Rusher believed that “a certain amount of deprivation today, in the interest of a far healthier society tomorrow, is neither unendurable nor necessarily reprehensible.”

Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian émigré and University of Chicago professor whose 1944 Road to Serfdom dared to suggest that state planning would produce not “freedom and prosperity” but “bondage and misery,” visited Pinochet’s Chile a number of times. He was so impressed that he held a meeting of his famed Société Mont Pélérin there. He even recommended Chile to Thatcher as a model to complete her free-market revolution. The Prime Minister, at the nadir of Chile’s 1982 financial collapse, agreed that Chile represented a “remarkable success” but believed that Britain’s “democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent” make “some of the measures” taken by Pinochet “quite unacceptable.”

Like Friedman, Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet the avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a “transitional period,” only as long as needed to reverse decades of state regulation. “My personal preference,” he told a Chilean interviewer, “leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.” In a letter to the London Times he defended the junta, reporting that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.” Of course, the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet’s regime weren’t talking.

Hayek’s University of Chicago colleague Milton Friedman got the grief, but it was Hayek who served as the true inspiration for Chile’s capitalist crusaders. It was Hayek who depicted Allende’s regime as a way station between Chile’s postwar welfare state and a hypothetical totalitarian future. Accordingly, the Junta justified its terror as needed not only to prevent Chile from turning into a Stalinist gulag but to sweep away fifty years of tariffs, subsidies, capital controls, labor legislation, and social welfare provisions — a “half century of errors,” according to finance minister Sergio De Castro, that was leading Chile down its own road to serfdom.

“To us, it was a revolution,” said government economist Miguel Kast, an Opus Dei member and follower of both Hayek and American Enterprise Institute theologian Michael Novak. The Chicago economists had set out to affect, radically and immediately, a “foundational” conversion of Chilean society, to obliterate its “pseudo-democracy” (prior to 1973, Chile enjoyed one of the most durable constitutional democracies in the Americas).

Where Friedman made allusions to the superiority of economic freedom over political freedom in his defense of Pinochet, the Chicago group institutionalized such a hierarchy in a 1980 constitution named after Hayek’s 1960 treatise The Constitution of Liberty. The new charter enshrined economic liberty and political authoritarianism as complementary qualities. They justified the need of a strong executive such as Pinochet not only to bring about a profound transformation of society but to maintain it until there was a “change in Chilean mentality.” Chileans had long been “educated in weakness,” said the president of the Central Bank, and a strong hand was needed in order to “educate them in strength.” The market itself would provide tutoring: When asked about the social consequences of the high bankruptcy rate that resulted from the shock therapy, Admiral José Toribio Merino replied that “such is the jungle of . . . economic life. A jungle of savage beasts, where he who can kill the one next to him, kills him. That is reality.”

But before such a savage nirvana of pure competition and risk could be attained, a dictatorship was needed to force Chileans to accept the values of consumerism, individualism, and passive rather than participatory democracy. “Democracy is not an end in itself,” said Pinochet in a 1979 speech written by two of Friedman’s disciples, but a conduit to a truly “free society” that protected absolute economic freedom. Friedman hedged on the relationship between capitalism and dictatorship, but his former students were consistent: “A person’s actual freedom,” said Finance Minister de Castro, “can only be ensured through an authoritarian regime that exercises power by implementing equal rules for everyone.” “Public opinion,” he admitted, “was very much against [us], so we needed a strong personality to maintain the policy.”

Jeane Kirkpatrick was among those who traveled to Chile to pay respect to the pioneer, lauding Pinochet for his economic initiatives. “The Chilean economy is a great success,” the ambassador said, “everyone knows it, or they should know it.” She was dispatched by Reagan shortly after his 1981 inauguration to “normalize completely [Washington’s] relations with Chile in order to work together in a pleasant way,” including the removal of economic and arms sanctions and the revocation of Carter’s “discriminatory” human rights policy. Such pleasantries, though, didn’t include meeting with the relatives of the disappeared, commenting on the recent deportation of leading opposition figures, or holding Pinochet responsible for the 1976 car bomb execution of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to the US, in Washington’s Dupont Circle— all issues Kirkpatrick insisted would be resolved with “quiet diplomacy.”

Setting aside the struggles surrounding religion, race, and sexuality that give American politics its unique edge, it was in Chile where the New Right first executed its agenda of defining democracy in terms of economic freedom and restoring the power of the executive branch. Under Pinochet’s firm hand, the country, according to prominent Chicago graduate Cristián Larroulet, became a “pioneer in the world trend toward forms of government based on a free social order.” Its privatized pension system, for example, is today held up as a model for the transformation of Social Security, with Bush having received advice from Chilean economist José Piñera, also a Chicago student, on how to do so in 1997. Pinochet “felt he was making history,” said Piñera, “he wanted to be ahead of both Reagan and Thatcher.”

Friedman too saw himself in the vanguard. “In every generation,” he is quoted in his flattering New York Times obituary, which spares just a sentence on his role in Chile, “there’s got to be somebody who goes the whole way, and that’s why I believe as I do.”

And trailblazer both men were, harbinger of a brave and merciless new world. But if Pinochet’s revolution was to spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere, it first had to take hold in the United States. And even as the dictator was “torturing people so prices could be free,”as Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once mordantly observed, the insurgency that would come to unite behind Ronald Reagan was gathering steam.

Today, Pinochet is under house arrest for his brand of “shock therapy,” and Friedman is dead. But the world they helped usher in survives, in increasingly grotesque form. What was considered extreme in Chile in 1975 has now become the norm in the US today: a society where the market defines the totality of human fulfillment, and a government that tortures in the name of freedom.

GREG GRANDIN teaches Latin American history at NYU and is the author of the Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and The Rise of the New Imperialism, from which this essay has been excerpted. He can be reached at: gjg4@nyu.edu

chomsky says adam smith definitive schol version has famous paen to mkt in W of N but deletes the following section where it reduces us to serfs. booktv 2013 cambridge talk

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http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=380&name=University-of-Chicago

Its weed killer atrazine is one of the most popular herbicides in the United States, with 76 million pounds applied each year. But the herbicide’s tendency to drift off targeted sites led to a ban by Germany in 1991, and following a 2004 vote, by the 27 member countries of the European Union.

Syngenta’s attorney on the case, Kurt Reeg, declined to comment for this story.

A videotaped deposition of University of Chicago Professor Don Coursey, played in court, demonstrated Syngenta’s use of seemingly independent experts to make its case, typically without disclosing payments to them. Their work downplays the risks of pesticides, herbicides and other agricultural agents to human health, and warns of grave economic consequences if farmers ceased using the chemicals.

Syngenta had hired Coursey through PR agency Jayne Thompson & Associates to write about the economic losses that would be created by an atrazine ban. He estimated that an atrazine ban would eliminate 21,000 to 48,000 jobs and create an economic loss for U.S. corn production of $2.3 to $5 billion.

Over the course of questioning, however, Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who is representing the water companies, raised doubts about the validity of those assumptions and the integrity of the analysis.

Coursey admitted his reports were based on an atrazine ban, something not sought in Tillery’s lawsuit. He also admitted he had not read the legal complaint and was ordered by Syngenta and the PR agency to analyze the cost of an atrazine ban.

For his expert opinion, Coursey was able to supplement his university salary handsomely. In his deposition, Coursey said that Syngenta’s PR firm paid him $500 an hour and gave him $50 an hour for a research assistant over three to four years. His reports relied on data supplied by Syngenta, he said, adding that he had an office at the public relations firm. He submitted his work to both Jayne Thompson and Syngenta for editing.

Coursey said the PR agency also paid him $500 an hour to meet with newspaper editors and radio talk show hosts, and to make a presentation to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Just the same, Syngenta initially refused to honor a subpoena for Coursey to testify in the trial or turn over documents, and relented only after judicial intervention.

Coursey did not respond to requests for an interview.

In a memo released in April as part of the discovery process, the PR firm proposed planting stories with newspapers critical of the Madison County courts and suggesting the lawsuit could be characterized as an attack on family farmers. The memo suggested castigating the Madison County judicial system as a “judicial hellhole” and the source of “jackpot justice.”

As the hearing continued, Tillery told the judge that realtors in some areas served by the plaintiffs had been informed property values would decline if this lawsuit proceeds.

John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy 's Friends

University of Chicago

The Center is transcribing Strauss's lectures for publication

see chicago boys, includes dictators cf palast book

includes Korry? chile p90- ITT, pepsi?

"Dr. Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of Defense and has been a Counselor to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

Overview & history

In the early half of the 20th century, petrochemical giants organized a coup on the medical research facilities, hospitals and universities. The Rockefeller family sponsored research and donated sums to universities and medical schools which had drug based research. They further extended this policy to foreign universities and medical schools where research was drug based through their "International Education Board". Establishments and research which were were not drug based were refused funding and soon dissolved in favor of the lucrative pharmaceutical industry. ^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=University_of_Chicago#cite_note-1)

The Rockefeller Foundation was originally set up in 1904 as the General Education Fund. The RF was later formed in 1910 and issued a charter in 1913 with the help of Rockefeller millions. Subsequently, the foundation placed it's own "nominees" in federal health agencies and set the stage for the "reeducation" of the public. ^{[3]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=University_of_Chicago#cite_note-2) See also Rockefeller Foundation.

The Baptists established a School of Divinity within the university. The school remained a mainstay throughout the Jim Crow era, as Baptists provided absolution for leaders enforcing segregation laws and laymen committing violence against African Americans.

In 1942, faculty ignited the world's first anthropogenically initiated nuclear reaction under the bleachers in the football field, sparking the nuclear age. The university also provided enriched uranium for the Manhattan Project and for the two atomic bombs used against Japanese civilians. ^{[4]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=University_of_Chicago#cite_note-3)

Since the 1940s, the university has become an academic powerhouse. It has accumulated more nobel laureates than any other American institution. Its physics, mathematics, sociology and economics departments are particularly influential. Several leading conservative economists of the 20th century; including Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Richard Posner have taught or teach there. Current faculty includes John Mearshimer, Mark Hansen (Political Science); Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Stephen Levitt, Robert Fogel (Economics),Richard Posner (Law), James Redfield (Classics), JM Coetzee and David Bevington (English).

...

Alumni & former/current faculty

Board of trustees

Andrew M. Alper, Charles A. Lewis, David G. Booth, Peter W. May, Thomas A. Cole, Joseph Neubauer, E. David :{Coolidge :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:III, Emily Nicklin, James S. Crown, Harvey B. Plotnick, Katharine P. Darrow, Michael P. Polsky, Erroll B. Davis, Jr., Thomas J. Pritzker, Craig J. Duchossois, George A. Ranney, Jr., James S. Frank, Thomas A. Reynolds III, Jack W. Fuller, John W. Rogers, Jr., Timothy M. George, Andrew M. Rosenfield, Rodney L. Goldstein, David M. Rubenstein, Mary Louise Gorno, Steve G. Stevanovich, Kathryn C. Gould, Richard P. Strubel, Sanford J. Grossman, Mary A. Tolan, King W. Harris, Byron D. Trott, Kenneth M. Jacobs, Marshall I. Wais, Jr., Karen L. Katen, Gregory Westin Wendt, Dennis J. Keller, Jon Winkelried, Steven A. Kersten, Paula Wolff, James M. Kilts, Jr., Paul G. Yovovich, Michael J. Klingensmith, Francis T.F. Yuen, Michael L. Klowden, Robert J. Zimmer, Robert W. Lane ^{[8]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=University_of_Chicago#cite_note-7)

see Becker

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys

The Chicago Boys (c. 1970s) were a group of young male, mostly Chilean economists, the majority of whom trained at the Department of Economics of the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, or at its affiliate in the economics department at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Upon their return to Latin America they adopted positions in numerous CIA-backed right-wing South American governments as economic advisors, many of them reaching high positions.^[1]

History

The term Chicago Boys has been used at least as early as the 1980s^[2] to describe Latin American economists who studied or identified with the neoliberal economic theories then taught at the University of Chicago, even though some of them earned degrees at Harvard or MIT (see below). "Chicago boys generally advocated widespread deregulation, privatization, and other free market policies for closely controlled economies. They rose to fame as leaders of the early reforms initiated in Chile during the rule of General Augusto Pinochet."^[2] Milton and Rose Friedman used the term Chicago Boys in their memoir: "In 1975, when inflation still raged and a world recession triggered a depression in Chile, General Pinochet turned to the "Chicago Boys" ... and appointed several of them to powerful positions in the government.^[3]

The training program was the result of a "Chile Project" organized in the 1950s by the U.S. State Department, through the Point Four program, the first US program for international economic development. It was funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundationaimed at influencing Chilean economic thinking. The University of Chicago’s Department of Economics set up scholarship programs with Chile’s Catholic University. About one hundred select students between 1957 and 1970 received training, first in an apprenticeship program in Chile and then in post-graduate work in Chicago.

The project was uneventful until the early 1970s. The Chicago Boys' ideas remained on the fringes of Chilean economic and political thought, even after a group of them prepared a 189-page “Program for Economic Development” called El ladrillo ("the brick").^[4] It was presented 1969 as part of Jorge Alessandri's (unsuccessful) presidential candidacy. Alessandri rejected El ladrillo, but it was revisited after the 1973 Chilean coup d'état on 11 September 1973 brought Augusto Pinochet to power, and it became the basis of the new regime's economic policy.

Even though the "Chile Project" ended, the training connection between Chile and the University of Chicago continues. One of the numerous networking organizations for alumni, including the Chicago Boys, is the "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business" (LATAM).

The term continues to be used in popular culture, business magazines (see external links).

Key Chicago Boys

Chile

Some of the more than 100 Chilean "Chicago Boys" are or were:

Jorge Cauas Minister of Finance (1975–1977)
Sergio de Castro Minister of Finance (1977–1982)
Carlos Massad Comisión Económica para América Latina(Cepal) (1974-1992), World Bank (1978-1981), Central Bank of Chile 1996-2003
Ernesto Fontaine Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Administration Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile,returned to Chile financed by the Inter American Development Bank in 1976, chief of the "external financing unit" of the Organization of American States (OAS)where he organized a Technical Assistance Program which trained teams of public officials in Project Preparation and Social Evaluation,^[5] World Bank consultant, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) died 1/20/2014 of lung cancer
Pablo Barahona (Minister of Economy, 1976–1979)
José Piñera (Minister of Labor and Pensions, 1978–1980, Minister of Mining, 1980–1981) (although his PhD is from Harvard)
Hernán Büchi Minister of Finance, 1985–1989, MBA at Columbia University
Alvaro Bardón (Minister of Economy, 1982–1983)
Juan Carlos Méndez (Budget Director, 1975–1981)
Emilio Sanfuentes (Economic advisor to Central Bank)
Sergio de la Cuadra (Minister of Finance, 1982–1983)
Francisco RosendeResearch Manager, Central Bank of Chile (1985 and 1990, Antitrust Commission (1999 and 2001), Dean and professor of economics, Faculty of Business and Economy of PUC since 1995.^[6]
Miguel Kast Minister of Planning (1978–1980), Labor Minister (1980-82), Governor of the Central Bank of Chile (1982–83).
Martín Costabal (Budget Director, 1987–1989)
Juan Ariztía Matte (Private Pension System Superintendent, 1980–1990)
Maria Teresa Infante (Minister of Labor 1988–1990)
Camilo Carrasco Alfonso (General Manager of Central Bank, 1994-2005)
Joaquín Lavín (Minister of Education, 2010–2011, Minister of Planning 2011–present)
Cristián Larroulet Vignau Chief of Staff of the Finance Minister, member of National Commission for Privatization, Head of Antitrust Commission, Minister of General Secretariat to the Presidency [SEGPRES], 2010–present), Executive Director at Libertad y Desarrollo, a private think tank, Dean and professor of economics, Faculty of Business and Economy at Universidad Del Desarrollo (UDD) Santiago, Chile, member of Board of several public enterprises, member of the Mount Pelerin Society.^[7]
Juan Andrés Fontaine (Minister of Economy, 2010–2011)
Francisco Perez Mackenna Chief Executive Officer of Quinenco since 1998, one of Chile’s largest conglomerates, assets of over US$33.1 billion, industrial and financial services companies. Director of many Quinenco group companies, including Banco de Chile, Madeco, CCU, Inversiones y Rentas, LQIF, ECUSA, CCU Argentina and Banchile Corretores de Bolsa, and Advisor to the Board of Vina San Pedro Tarapaca.1991-1998, CEO of CCU. Universidad Catolica de Chile, major in Business Administration. MBA from University of Chicago.^[8]
Jose de Gregorio Governor of the Central Bank of Chile since 2007. Vice-Governor from 12/2003-12/2007, member of the Bank's Board from 6/2001. 2000- 2001 “tri-minister” of Economy, Mining and Energy. 1997-2000 professor at the Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica. Before 1997 Coordinator of Economic Policy at Ministry of Finance and economist research department International Monetary Fund, degree in civil engineering and master’s degree in engineering from University of Chile (1984), PhD in Economics from MIT 1990.

Elsewhere in Latin America:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Although the largest and most influential group of so-called Chicago Boys was Chilean in origin, there were many Latin American graduates from the University of Chicago around the same period. These economists continued to shape the economies of their respective countries, and include people likeMexico's Francisco Gil Díaz, Fernando Sanchez Ugarte, Carlos Isoard y Viesca, Argentina's Domingo Cavallo, Adolfo Diz, Roque Fernández, Carlos Alfredo Rodríguez, Fernando de Santibañez and Ricardo Lopez Murphy, as well as others in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Uruguay,Costa Rica, and Panama.

Notes:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;display:inline !important"):}:References:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

^ Naomi Klein, 2007, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^a ^b(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys#cite_ref-GaryBecker_2-1) Gary S. Becker (1997-10-30). "What Latin America Owes to the "Chicago Boys:{":(style="padding-right:0.2em"):}:". Hoover Digest. Stanford University. Retrieved 2012-11-14.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ Two Lucky People: Memoirs. Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman. University of Chicago Press, 1998. p. 398.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ El Ladrillo. Bases de la política económica del gobierno militar chileno.Santiago: CEP 2nd edition1992
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business (Latam Group)Speaker Profile". Retrieved 2014-01-26.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business (Latam Group)Speaker Profile". Retrieved 2014-01-26.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business (Latam Group) Speaker Profile". Retrieved 2014-01-26.
:{Jump up:(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;user-select:none;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:^ "Latin American Business Group at Chicago Booth School of Business (Latam Group)Speaker Profile". Retrieved 2014-01-26.

External links:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

PBS Video clip – Chicago Boys and Pinochet
Is Chile a Neoliberal Success? analysis of Chicago Boys' policies in Dollars & Sense magazine 2004
Forbes Magazine article 2010-3-17
Audio clip – 'Chicago Boys' Leave Lasting Legacy on Chile's Economy, National Public Radio

hydr

Strauss assisted in leaving Germ by Schmitt (sp) atty helped get rid of Weimar

von Hayek, Mt Perlin Soc --> heritage, Manhatt, Pacific

U Chic big infl, since 69 all Nobels to Free traders (krugman?)

vulture pic: U Chic graD BIZ school Latin Am seminar led by Arnold Harberger (adviser Pinochet? milton

friedman Prof Black math whiz (Thales praised for making money crooked?) 271 wolfie aND

pearle studied w/ leo strauss; goldmaN SACHs FELL for blacked model:securities that were

"derived' from movements of other securities (a hedge?) grew to 83Trillion $ by 2008 273

but aLL assumes mkts are rational and wise (that info is avaialble?)

ari and adam smith warned us about "rent' seeking and reaping what we do not sow (w/ other

ppl $?) 274 Robt Rubin came from GS to clinton admin. sandy weill chr of citigroup, 4

mos after glass-stegall gone, rubin joined cit as co-chr? 323

palast bdmcbuy

Madhouse

It's been twenty-five years since I sat with Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys as they

planned our new world. The Chicago Boys' grouping, officially called the "Latin

American Finance Workshop," was directed by Professor Arnold Harbergerj

Friedman's

was the "Money and Banking Workshop." I worked my way in with both of them-even

then I was undercover, operating for the electrical and steelworkers' union leaders Frank

Rosen and Eddie Sadlowski. Frank told me, "Keep your mouth shut, put away the

childish Mao buttons, put on a suit and find out what these guys are up to."

I wouldn't call Milton Friedman a midget, but what sticks in my mind is that his feet

didn't touch the floor from the built-up in which he presided.

:{In those years, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was a hot topic. The nation was controlled by

whites, 5 percent of the population, who kept the 95 percent Black population in virtual

slavery, without hope and certainly without the right to vote. Professor Friedman opined

from his high chair, "Why are people attacking the only democracy in Africa?}:" And I

remember that, at time, the professor was driven around in a black limousine by a Black

chauffeur.

So, while the other students-the budding bankers and dictators-in-training-are drooling in

admiration, I'm reporting back to the unions, "This Friedman is one sick puppy. And no

one's going to buy this self-serving 'laissez faire' free market mumbo jumbo from some

ultra-right wing-nut."

But now, two decades later, Bush and Clinton and Putin and Wolfensohn open their

mouths and out comes Milton Friedman. And everywhere I turn, the guys running the

show are wearing their Golden Straitjackets and grinning and groping and agreeing with

each other. And all I can think of is something another professor of mine, Allen Ginsberg,

once said: The soul should not die ungodly in an armed madhouse

1965: Former RAND Analyst Gathers Young, Nascent Neoconservatives

Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago, gathers a cadre of fiery young intellectuals around him, many of whom are working and associating with the magazine publisher Irving Kristol (see 1965). Wohlstetter’s group includes Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Paul Wolfowitz. Wohlstetter, himself a protege of the Machiavellian academic Leo Strauss, is often considered the “intellectual godfather” of modern neoconservatism.

Formerly an analyst at the RAND Corporation, Wohlstetter wielded a powerful influence on the US’s foreign policy during the heyday of the Cold War. Wohlstetter, who is believed to be one of several analysts who became a model for director Stanley Kubrick’s title character in the 1968 filmDr. Strangelove,added dramatic phrases like “fail-safe” and “second strike” capability to the US nuclear lexicon, and pushed to increase the US’s military might over what he saw as the imminent and lethal threat of Soviet nuclear strikes and the Soviet Union’s plans for global hegemony. He was such a powerful figure in his hundreds of briefings that he projected far more certainty than his facts actually supported. Though his facts and statistics were often completely wrong, he was so relentless and strident that his ideas gained more credence than they may have warranted.

By 1965, he is known in some circles as a “mad genius” who is now collecting and molding young minds to follow in his footsteps. Author Craig Unger writes in 2007, “To join Team Wohlstetter, apparently, one had to embrace unquestioningly his worldviews, which eschewed old-fashioned intelligence as a basis for assessing the enemy’s intentions and military capabilities in favor of elaborate statistical models, probabilities, reasoning, systems analysis, and game theory developed at RAND.”

An analyst with the Federation of Atomic Scientists will write in November 2003: “This methodology exploited to the hilt the iron law of zero margin for error.… Even a small probability of vulnerability, or a potential future vulnerability, could be presented as a virtual state of emergency.” Or as one-time Wohlstetter acolyte Jude Wanninski will later put it, “[I]f you look down the road and see a war with, say, China, twenty years off, go to war now.” Unger will observe, “It was a principle his acolytes would pursue for decades to come—with disastrous results.”

[The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America\'s Future(New York City: Scribner, 2007)., 42-46.')" onmouseout="return nd()">Unger, 2007, pp. 42-46]

Entity Tags: University of Chicago, Stanley Kubrick, Richard Perle, Zalmay M. Khalilzad, RAND Corporation, Leo Strauss, Albert Wohlstetter, Paul Wolfowitz, Irving Kristol, Federation of Atomic Scientists, Craig Unger, Jude Wanninski

Category Tags: Albert Wohlstetter, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad, US Policy Towards Soviet Union

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=neoconinfluence&neoconinfluence_prominent_neoconservatives=neoconinfluence_zalmay_khalilzad

THE RISE OF THE CONSERVATIVE LEGAL MOVEMENT: THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF THE LAW, by Steven M. Teles. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 385pp. Cloth. $35.00/£19.95. ISBN: 9780691122083.

Reviewed by Roy B. Flemming, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University. Email: roy [at] politics.tamu.edu.

Sure, it was a coincidence but the timing could not have been better. The morning before I sat down to write this review, I received a solicitation letter from the Federalist Society asking me for a donation. The letter signed by Eugene B. Meyer, the organization’s president, pointedly quoted Steven Teles’ comment from his book that the “Federalist Society represents, without a doubt, the most vigorous, durable, and well-ordered organization to emerge from . . . modern conservatism’s political strategy.”

When Teles set out to document the stumbles, turning points, and successes of the conservative counter-mobilization against legal liberalism, his “first real breakthrough” came after Meyer let him loose to rummage through the Society’s internal documents. Other entrepreneurs in the conservative legal movement like Henry Manne, William “Chip” Mellor, and Clint Bolickfully cooperated with Teles, answering his questions and providing him with background documents. Equally important, pivotal financial patrons of the movement, like the Olin Foundation, followed suit. Finally, Teles decided to organize his research around the themes of strategy and entrepreneurship which he credits to conversations with Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. No published study about the conservative legal movement of which I am aware can compete with the information, detail, perspectives, and stories that Teles has packed into his book.

Teles’ major stories pivot around the formation and evolution of the Federalist Society, the emergence and institutionalization of law and economics as part of law school curriculums, the Center for Individual Rights, and the Institute for Justice. Nested within these narratives are vignettes of other players and organizations that illustrate how patrons and entrepreneurs learned from their mistakes and redirected their strategies. Teles quickly alerts his readers that he not concerned with organizations like the American Center for Law and Justice that have been involved in religious or social conservative litigation. Nor is he interested in the thicket of conservative think tanks that sprouted up during the past three decades or in the proliferation of litigating groups with traditional pro-business agendas or interests in tort reform. The price of Teles’ tight focus, however, is easily off-set by the many benefits generated by his in-depth discussions.

The idea for a conservative legal counter-mobilization first surfaced in Lewis Powell’s confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 shortly before Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court. (Powell’s memo can be found at [*633] www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/personality/print/sources_document13.html).

Entitled “Attack of [sic] the American Free Enterprise System,” Powell argued America’s economic system was under “broad attack.” The “most disquieting” attacks were not those made by the usual left-wing or socialist suspects but those from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.” Powell urged the Chamber to confront the criticism especially in universities and colleges (including a “balancing of faculties”) and redirect the public agenda by creating incentives for “independent scholars who believe in the system” to publish more often and more widely. In a very real sense, Powell’s ideas foreshadowed Manne’s campaign to create law and economics centers in law schools and the Olin Foundation’s initiatives aimed at the elite schoolsas well as the network of conservative faculty and students created by the Federalist Society.

In a section called a “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts,” Powell cautioned that liberal and far left groups had been “far more astute” in recognizing the “judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” This could be a “vast area of opportunity” for the Chamber and the soon-to-be associate justice recommended that it hire “highly competent” staff attorneys to file amicus briefs in the Supreme Court or under special circumstances retain “lawyers of national standing and reputation” to participate in Chamber-sponsored law suits. The American Civil Liberties Union, civil rights groups, and liberal public interest law outfits like those created by Ralph Nader, offered off-the-shelf templates that conservatives could use to organize their counter-mobilization. As Teles explains, Powell implied that the fundamental problem was an imbalance in the interests appearing in courtrooms and that it could be righted by recruiting pro-business if not conservative “repeat players” and by a revival of “judicial restraint” on the bench.

Things did not play out as simply as Powell intimated. Following the formation of the Pacific Legal Foundation in 1973 with the support from the California Chamber of Commerce, several other regional foundations were soon created under the auspices of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI). This network was organized geographically, not functionally, and held together by interlocking directorships. The result was “organizational turmoil” because as one insider told Teles “NLCPI had all the structural flaws of the Articles of Confederation” (p.63). Equally telling, the emphasis on filing amicus briefs displaced coherent litigation strategies and put the foundations on fund-raising treadmills. Most damning of all for Powell’s business-led strategy were unexpected tensions between business interests and conservative ideology. As Adam Smith cautioned long ago, business interests are not synonymous with the public interest however it is defined.

Teles’ cameo study of the Mountain States Legal Foundation illustrates the point. With reliable funding from Joseph Coors, a long-time patron of right-wing causes, effective leadership in the early years by James Watts who later became President Reagan’s Interior [*634] Secretary, and a shared sense of grievance arising from the “Sagebrush Rebellion” in the Western states over the control of federal lands, the Mountain States Legal Foundation had several built-in advantages. Nevertheless it faltered because its business allies expected returns on their “investments” and the foundation often filed amicus briefs in response to particular contributions or to encourage new ones. Matters came to a head when the foundation challenged on First Amendment grounds Denver’s grant of an exclusive cable television franchise to a local businessman, a grant widely supported by the Mile High City’s business community. As an insider explained to Teles, the foundation’s suit “gored very powerful interests there, well connected to the Republican Party . . . Joe Coors resigned from our board [saying] . . . ’I founded MSLF . . . to take on the Sierra Club, not to do this sort of thing’” (p.65).

Soul-searching about the strategy behind the first generation of public interest firms began in the late 1970s whenMichael Horowitz (subsequently chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget during the first Reagan administration) submitted a highly critical report to the Scaife Foundation. The Horowitz Report redefined the goals of the legal counter-mobilization. Litigation alone could not dislodge legal liberalism. Ties to business interests tethered conservative public interest firms and held them back from taking the moral high ground. Amicus briefs were “pufferies intended for naïve audiences of donors and not truly doing meaningful work” (p.71). The aversion to basing organizations in Washington, D.C. had to be jettisoned in order to confront liberalism on its own turf. Most important of all, the movement needed to redefine itself along clear, consistent libertarian lines with long-term strategies that would appeal to underdogs caught up in unresponsive legal institutions like black beauticians struggling under state regulations or lower middle class whites whose houses were threatened by eminent domain. Conservatives had to become idealistic “good guys” limiting government and empowering civil society.

The Horowitz Report doused cold water on patron enthusiasm for funding conservative public interest law firms but in time the foundations used the report to restructure how these firms operated Two of these second generation firms are the subject of a separate chapter in which Teles compares the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), best known for its battles against affirmative action policies at the University of Texas and University of Michigan, and the Institute for Justice (IJ) whose fame soared after it turned defeat in KELO v. CITY OF NEW LONDON into a public policy success. While the two firms differ significantly in many ways, they share important similarities. For one thing, judicial activism no longer is a dirty word. Instead both firms see judicial activism as a means of reviving old rights to protect the conservative goal of limited government; property rights and eminent domain offer just one example. Clint Bolick (2007), co-founder of the Institute for Justice, recently argued in favor of judicial activism in a new book published by the libertarian Cato Institute. The firms, seeing the value in an activist bench, are accordingly more strategic in the cases they select and [*635] keep a steady eye on whether a case has the potential to change the public policy agenda or the law.

Horowitz, like Powell, stressed that a “key site” to contest legal liberalism was the university. In three chapters, Teles traces the winding, upward path of the law and economics movement and the seemingly inexorable growth of the Federalist Society. The law and economics story has two parts. The first deals with constructing the “mother ship” at the University of Chicago and the travails of Henry Manne to build law and economic centers at other universities and his final success at George Mason University.

Chicago legitimized law and economics. The JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS, the sub-field’s first journal, started there and was later edited by Ronald Coase who won a Nobel Prize for his work. Chicago’s highly influential Anti-Trust Project provided fellowships supported by the Volker Fund, attracted law professors like Robert Bork, and revolutionized the field. Richard Posner with impeccable establishment credentials (Harvard Law and former Supreme Court clerk for Justice William Brennan) wrote ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF LAW (published in 1973 and now in its seventh edition) in which he challenged myriad shibboleths in traditional legal research. In the meantime, Manne spread the gospelby pushing for new centers at other universities, aggressively marketed law and economics with help from theLiberty Fundby holding regular conferences that identified ambitious scholars and brought them into the conservative fold, and through the Economics Institute for Federal Judgesintroduced numerous judges to the fundamentals of micro-economics.

The second part of the story focuses on the Olin Foundation’s strategic deployment of its largesse aimed directly at faculty and students in elite law schools (most of Manne’s centers were at lesser-ranked schools) which solidified the stature of the law and economics sub-field and raised its status as a distinctive alternative to traditional and contemporary legal scholarship. Law and economics was not Olin’s first choice, however. As an official explained to Teles: “I would have preferred to do something in constitutional law but . . . [i]f you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand . . . Law and economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government. That is, like many disciplines, it seems neutral but it isn’t in fact” (p.189). Olin’s gamble on law and economics paid off handsomely in ways that Lewis Powell would have applauded. At Harvard, Olin’s support for law and economics provided money, academic panache, and camouflage for Harvard’s president who wanted to stymie the critical legal studies movement and mollify angry alumni in corporate law firms upset by the havoc they felt the “crits” were creating within the profession. Law and economics raised the research bar for hiring and tenure decisions and offered alternatives to law schools that altered the balance of power in their faculties.

The Federalist Society rang repeated alarms within the legal profession that Harvard Law was “out of control” and [*636] from its beginning the Society has been concerned generally about the placement of conservatives in law schools and out of them. Teles maintains in his chapter on the Society, however, that over the course of its twenty-five year history the Federalist Society has carved out an influential niche for itself bylimitingits attention to creating and fostering complex networks of lawyers, faculty, law students, and foundation patrons that are held together by an emphasis on serious debate and discourse over ideas that challenge legal liberalism while avoiding right-wing factionalism. Eschewing the establishment of an in-house litigation center early on, the Society also decided not turn itself into a conservative clone of the American Bar Association despite earlier feelings that perhaps it should and despite its persistent criticisms of the ABA. These strategic choices (there were others at critical moments) were made by a stable, self-perpetuating cadre of long-serving leaders, including Eugene Meyer, who were present at the Society’s founding and are aligned with foundation executives and senior figures from the legal community.

Teles neither constructs a theory of the rise of the conservative legal movement nor tests one. Conceptual references are employed at various times but largely to locate the study within the existing literature. This by no means diminishes Teles’ accomplishment. Each of his multiple interlocking stories of the pas de troisbetween different conservative entrepreneurs, their patrons and financiers, and the institutions they either created or tried to change took place over several years and demanded clear precise detailing, which they duly received. Teles’ book is an important reference and the chief departure point for anybody seriously wanting to understand one of the most important transformations in contemporary legal history and politics.

REFERENCES:

Bolick, Clint. 2007. DAVID’S HAMMER: THE CASE FOR AN ACTIVIST JUDICIARY. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.

Posner, Richard. 1973. ECONOMICS OF LAW. Boston: Little Brown and Company.

CASE REFERENCE:

KELO v. CITY OF NEW LONDON, 545 U.S. 469 (2005)

*********************

Roy B. Flemming.

http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/teles0708.htm

univ chic bak

Discussion

/ / 3 COMMENTS

CHICAGO SCHOOL / CORPORATISM / HAYEK / HEALTH / LATE STAGE CAPITALISM / MEDICINE / MILTON FRIEDMAN IS MARTIN SHKRELI'S SPIRITUAL FATHER / MONOPOLISM / PHARMA / SOCIOPATHS / THE ENTREPRENEURIAL STATE

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chomsky says adam smith definitive schol version has famous paen to mkt in W of N but deletes the following section where it reduces us to serfs. booktv 2013 cambridge talk

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http://www.politicalfriendster.com/showPerson.php?id=380&name=University-of-Chicago

see chicago boys, includes dictators cf palast book

"Dr. Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Department of Defense and has been a Counselor to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

Overview & history

Alumni & former/current faculty

Board of trustees

History

Key Chicago Boys

Chile

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1965: Former RAND Analyst Gathers Young, Nascent Neoconservatives